


Eru Lee and the Sundance Kid

by The_Carnivorous_Muffin



Series: Finishing the Hat [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Naruto, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe, Angst, Attempted Murder, Comedy of Errors, F/M, Female Harry Potter, Friendship/Love, Humor, Master of Death Harry Potter, Mentor/Protégé, Multi, Murder, Redemption, Romance, Unrequited Love, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2019-07-02 04:39:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 63,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15789132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Carnivorous_Muffin/pseuds/The_Carnivorous_Muffin
Summary: Instead of going to the Star Wars universe, the unwitting Eru Lee and Uchiha Obito stumble into a strange almost medieval world filled with immortal and terrifying hunter nin, clever half-sized shinobi with the all consuming goal of getting lucky, and the worst kage ever.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Obligatory note that this is NOT CANON. This is more a sister fic to "Finishing the Hat" than anything, that's not required reading but this fic starts in the same place and that one covers a lot more character development of Obito and how we got to where we got.

A small tale of a comedy of errors, mistaken identity and false conclusions, good men, bad men, beautiful women, unassuming hobbits, ends of worlds, and the lord of the rings.

 

Or perhaps, more simply, as Eru Lee would write in her mission report, the story of how two foreigners at once doomed Middle Earth then a short while later proceeded to save it.

 

* * *

 

_Part 1: Two shinobi, an unfortunate group of hobbits, and a ranger walk into a bar_

 

* * *

 

“Shishou, are you sure we’re not in Ame?”

 

It didn’t necessarily have the same feel of Ame, or at least, from the few times Obito had been to the unfortunate land of rain, but then even when one was standing in Ame it was a bit difficult to really make out your surroundings what with the constant downpour.

 

This new place, wherever it was, in some other time and space than Konoha or any of the elemental nations, had the same bone chilling heavy rain that, with a look up at the darkened sky, was not going to stop anytime soon.

 

Lee for her own part was already sighing and defying the very laws of reality by conjuring a pair of straw hats into existence, placing one over her own soaked red curls and handing the other to him which he took gratefully.

 

“It could be worse,” Lee noted, as they began walking, heading towards distant and dim flickering lights which probably marked some town or another.

 

Obito, beginning to circulate chakra through his fingers and body just to keep from being so goddamn cold, spared her a dry and entirely unamused look.

 

“We could have appeared in deep space, we could have been crushed by the planet’s gravity, we could have frozen to death in an ice dimension, drowned, been lit on fire, asphyxiated, trapped in a giant desert with no sign of civilization in sight,” she then looked over at him with her own wry, amused, smile as she noted, “The universe is dark, cruel, and unforgiving, my young apprentice. Really, considering everything, a little rain isn’t so bad.”

 

“A little rain,” Obito scoffed, feeling wet and more than a little miserable, “Is that what we’re calling this now?”

 

Lee didn’t deign to answer which was probably for the best. At the moment they were on some mud laden road that had seen better days, peering out into the night and the rain he could make out rolling hills lush with plant life, what looked like a wooden small dock at the end of a river. Given the rain, and his own mood because of it, he wasn’t at his analytical best but none the less he couldn’t help but note that there was something old fashioned about this place with its unpaved roads, grooves created by horse driven carts, and its wooden docks.

 

This place was nothing like Lee’s England and in its own way nothing like home either.

 

Of course, he wondered to himself now, rubbing his hands together for warmth and feeling, why would he have expected it to be? It was another dimension, the very fact that there were roads, hills, air that was breathable was almost miraculous. That there were so many similarities already, he thought to himself, was almost alarming.

 

Oh, he thought as he tilted his hat forward to block a gust of wind and the cold bitter rain that followed it, why had he agreed to this again? He could be at home, taking his jonin exams and pestering Rin and…

 

Well, who was he kidding?

 

He was Lee’s apprentice, as such, there was nowhere else he’d rather be in all the worlds than following her on the muddy yellow brick road, through rain, snow, and sleet, to whatever metaphorical emerald city awaited them in the distance.

 

Soon enough they were at the outside of the village, a walled place that might keep out bandits and perhaps even ronin but was a laughable defense in the face of even academy students were they so inclined to rape and pillage civilian villages in the middle of nowhere.

 

Obito spared Lee a glance, nodding towards the wall with the thought that it was child’s play for them to overcome, but she held her up her hand, shook her head, and motioned instead towards a gate at the end of the road.

 

Apparently, Obito thought, she’d really meant what she’d said to Minato-sensei before they’d gone off to parts unknown, that she and Obito would at least try to play by the rules of whatever land they stumbled into.

 

Or perhaps she didn’t want her first contact with the locals to be climbing over their walls looking for all intents like she was there to slaughter their children.

 

Either way, Lee and Obito followed the road to its end, stopping in front of the door and he watching as a wary civilian man opened it, eyes dark and suspicious as they landed upon both him and Lee. He asked something, something very clearly not English nor Obito’s native language.

 

At Lee and Obito’s silent and somewhat dumbfounded response he asked again, sharper, and this time Lee did speak, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for, you will let us pass.”

 

The man’s eyes glazed, caught helplessly in Lee’s genjutsu as a far stronger shinobi would have been, and closed the window and signaled for the opening of the gate, allowing both Lee and Obito inside.

 

“Really, shishou?” Obito asked as they stepped past the man, dressed in clothing more reminiscent of England than Konoha, a rain-soaked cloak held over his head, his face pale and waxy by the rain, and his boots thick and dark and far more practical than Obito’s water clogged socks and sandals were at the moment.

 

Lee’s eyebrow raised towards him, dark, red, and oh so judgemental.

 

“If you were going to start dealing out genjutsus we might as well have climbed the wall,” Obito noted.

 

“Well, I didn’t want to seem rude,” Lee said, as if turning the man’s mind against him was any less rude than scaling his village walls, “Besides now we know that they don’t speak anything I’m familiar with.”

 

“Did we think they would?” Obito asked dubiously, as surely, it’d be a sign of something truly horrifyingly alarming if they spoke either the language of the elemental nations or even English.

 

“Well, it was always a possibility,” Lee said before motioning a pale hand towards her heart, “After all, the universe is a very spotty thing, along with being dark and cruel, and surely a useful if alarming sign of it falling apart would be an entirely new world speaking something you and I both know.”

 

“By which you mean it’d be very convenient,” Obito corrected her to which she shrugged and nodded.

“Well, yes, that too.”

 

The village itself was, as the road was, laden with mud and more so wracked with poverty. The wooden houses groaned beneath the weight of the rain, pigs and animals sheltered beneath awnings in muddy sties, the men and women who rushed from one building to another all had thin forms from a lack of food and overabundance of work, dark eyes, and leering expressions for Lee and Obito who very clearly were dressed as none of them.

 

“We’re going to need new clothes,” Obito mentioned quietly, something the locals wore, and it’d likely be in their best interest to get out of this town for that matter. He wasn’t exactly sure why, the place screamed civilian, but there was something here, some heavy presence, that had him on edge.

 

“Yes,” Lee said, but not so much agreeing as saying something to say something, her eyes instead had landed on what appeared to be a tavern, sign decorated by an upright horse rearing its legs, “But first, I think, some shelter and a drink.”

 

Well, Obito wasn’t going to argue with a dry roof overhead even if drunk civilians came with it. The pair stepped inside, greeted by the wary proprietor who ushered them over to the bar area, and a small table.

 

The place was overcrowded, men guffawing and laughing and falling over one another and their drinks, women whose breasts were practically falling out of their dresses bustled between one table and another with drinks in hand ignoring wandering hands which pinched and grope at every turn, and everything smelled of rancid beer.

 

“I hate civilian bars,” Obito said with a shudder, dropping his hat onto the back of his chair and rubbing fingers through one hand, sighing gratefully as Lee dried him and herself off with a small jutsu.

 

“But it’s dry,” Lee said, her grin a sly fond thing as it stared at him, “And they’re all too drunk to look at us.”  


Obito snorted, as this was very untrue, already Obito’s half-marred face and mismatched eyes were drawing attention. Fear, disgust, and morbid curiosity from the poor girl who approached to serve them. But even Lee, especially Lee, their eyes lingered on, taking in her pale face, her bright hair that in this room of dull browns and blacks shone like the sun, and her bright green eyes.

 

Lee turned to the girl, a poor plain thing except for the astounding size of her breasts, and said, with a hint of genjutsu to suggest the meaning to the girl and pass over the misunderstood words, “Two of whatever is remotely palatable.”

 

The girl’s hazel eyes dimmed for a moment, but then she nodded, smiled, bobbed her head so that the brown mousey curls bobbed somewhat, then went to the bar to fetch what looked like… Well, the beer everyone else was drinking.

 

“God, I hope that tastes better than it smells,” Obito said before sighing and asking, “Couldn’t you have ordered us tea?”

 

“No one else is drinking tea,” Lee noted, as if this had any bearing on anything, as if they were even remotely blending in at the moment with their dark green, tactical, clothing and foreign features.

 

Then again, maybe Obito didn’t trust these people with tea, blending tea could be something akin to an art and could go wrong very quickly. Perhaps he was being prejudiced or perhaps was already homesick, but this didn’t seem like the place to have any decent green tea.

 

His eyes moved around the room again, landed on a man in the corner, avoided and glanced at in the same manner that Lee and Obito were being avoided and glanced at. He was dressed in similar clothing to them, to a point, but there was a sharpness and practicality to his outfit that the clothing of their waitresses and the patrons lacked. This was clothing that had seen time on the road, had been worn in by use and necessity, and more importantly he had taken the seat in the back corner so that he might watch all who came in, his katana, a blade almost English in nature, resting just within reach but far enough away to put a civilian falsely at ease.

 

Obito felt outwards, the man’s chakra… It was there, but it was nothing on an ordinary day at home that Obito would have been concerned by. A mildly decent chunin, perhaps, but certainly nothing to flee from.

 

Still, he nodded towards Lee, eyes flickering towards the man, “Shinobi, shishou?”

 

She considered their friend slowly, taking him in piece by piece, as the man in turn seemed to focus on her. Finally, Lee said a musing and noncommittal, “Perhaps.”

 

Either way, though Lee and Obito were undoubtedly a complication for him, Obito doubted they were or would become his mission. No, the man was clearly here for something else, something he deemed very important if the forced casualness of his posture was anything to go by.

 

Obito was about to say more, perhaps suggest they meet the man’s acquaintance or at least track him from the bar, back to wherever his hidden village or the equivalent was when he stopped and turned towards the door.

 

It was… It was as if Uzumaki Kushina had walked inside, no, more than that, it was as if Lee on a bad day had walked inside. There in the doorway, somewhere amid the huddle of… children? Either way, somewhere in the small cloaked huddle of four barefoot, cloaked, children, was a being whose raw chakra rivalled that of Lee herself.

 

He opened his mouth to say something, but no words came out, his tongue felt dry, the group huddled in and removed their hoods, revealing matured faces on bodies that seemed mature but were far smaller than Obito would have expected from any grown adult. Obito’s eyes wandered over them, fell onto one in the middle, a fair face with big blue eyes and brown loose curls that seemed so at odds with the raw… seductive… power he was exuding.

 

And there was, something strong and seductive pulling Obito towards him, whispering him in his ear and promising everything he’d ever wanted and everything that he’d never even thought to want before.

 

Not Rin, but something darker and headier than his desire for Rin, something that beckoned with pale fingers into dark chambers where…

 

Obito felt a hand fall on his shoulder, startling him out of his trance, he turned to see Lee looking at the midget with an expression that was incredibly out of sorts, as if she had no idea what to make of any of this, finally she said, “That has to be, the most gauche shinobi, that I have ever seen in my life.”

 

Obito blinked leaned back, breathing in and out, gulping down beer and shuddering as he tried to distract himself from the pull, remember that he was staring at… An extremely short if powerful shinobi who appeared to want Obito in his bed right now.

 

Obito shuddered.

 

“I’d tell him that I like my men a little taller, but I think he already knows,” Lee continued, eyes wide and green and lingering on the midget group even as they took their seats at a small table, “I think he just doesn’t give a shit. He’ll screw anything with chakra.”

 

“Seduction mission?” Obito asked, almost hopefully, because that at least would explain something.

 

But Lee just shook her head, “No, no, I think he does this for fun.”

 

“Wait, anything with chakra?” Obito asked, feeling that wave of heat again from the half-sized man, who really looked so… at odds with the genjutsu he was all but throwing out of his own body, “You think he wants…”

 

But Lee was nodding, insistent, not a hint of doubt in her mind, “Oh yes, I think he wants you, me, a pint of beer, and a king-sized bed to rock our worlds with his tiny little body.”

 

“Oh god,” Obito said, paling himself, and wondering at once how someone could be that subtle (the guy had barely glanced at them, no, he was glancing at them but with wariness and fear and hardly ‘come hither sweet child’) and at once so very blatant.

 

Well, certainly to the civilians, who appeared to be all except Obito, Lee, and their friend in the back corner, he was a subtle bastard.

 

Lee and Obito, at the same time, chugged down the stale, frankly horrid beer and raised their glasses for a refill.

 

Obito shuddered again, mind wandering back to that pull, and more to Lee’s own words on what exactly their new friend was trying to do, “Oh, goddammit, now I can’t get the images out of my head.”

 

“I know,” Lee agreed, rather pale herself, “And to think, all that masterful effort for something like that. He must want action very, very, badly.”

 

And it was, this was a… very powerful genjutsu. Granted, it wasn’t a full illusion, more a compulsion, but the sheer force of the compelling was not one to be tossed aside without a second thought. Even now, with Obito recognizing it for what it was, the compulsion had not disappeared as most genjutsu would have.

 

“No,” Obito said, “Surely, he must have some reason for doing this.”

 

Lee spared him a look, motioned towards their half-sized companions, and said, “A shinobi walks into a bar, which he must be almost certain is filled to the brim with civilians, and starts gushing out chakra in the most sensual and seductive manner I have ever seen any one hemorrhage chakra… Obito, you tell me how this joke ends.”

 

Obito took another drink, shuddering again, and feeling oh so very uncomfortable in every conceivable way.

 

“Do you want to bet he manages to get our friend the shinobi in the corner?” Lee asked, nodding her head towards the man, whose attention indeed had turned towards the half-sized group with an intensity and focus that would have frightened the shit out of any civilian.

 

Indeed, appeared to frighten the half-sized group, for all that most of them appeared to be civilians, and even Mr. Sensual Chakra himself who was doing an alarmingly good job of acting as if he hadn’t the slightest clue what he was doing.

Even as his raw power seemed to whisper in Obito’s ear in a soft, clear, and hauntingly beautiful voice, _“Come with me, child, and I shall give you all kingdoms of men.”_

 

Meanwhile some of the half-sized friends were getting very drunk, dancing atop the tables and clapping along to songs with the rest of the drunken horde of civilians, Obito watched then as a table overturned and the half-sized shinobi fell to the floor, a golden ring flying into the air then falling onto his finger as the shinobi… disappeared.

Obito’s sharingan instinctively turned on, then turned off as the chakra became almost blinding in its intensity, he covered his eye with a cry but even as he blinked, and his vision returned to normal he noted that the half-sized man had truly disappeared. It wasn’t an illusion, or it was, but it was one so strong that even the sharingan had not been able to break it.

 

“As I said,” Lee said slowly as the shaking, cowering, half-sized shinobi reappeared, “The most gauche shinobi I have ever seen.”

 

Still, gauche or not, the dark-haired, dark cloaked, shinobi in the corner was his for the taking in a matter of seconds as the man dragged seductive chakra Magoo and all his friends upstairs in no time at all.

 

So, Obito had to give credit where credit was do, he might have the subtlety of a battering ram and the eccentricities of any great shinobi, but damn if he didn’t get what he wanted.

 

Obito was just extremely grateful that it hadn’t really been Obito’s virgin dick that he wanted.


	2. Chapter 2

_Part 2: The nazgûl arrive, massive amounts of private and public property are shamelessly and wantonly destroyed, and our two shinobi heroes come to several wrong yet logical conclusions_

 

* * *

 

When one is hit on by a foreign ninja, a very short foreign ninja, with all the subtlety of Maito Gai or Jiraiya at the bathhouse, yet somehow still managed a certain sensual appeal despite or because of this, you almost had no choice but to stay in a beer-soaked tavern in a rain-soaked town and try to pretend that the moment had come, gone, and never happened.

 

And try to pretend that the silence you were hearing from upstairs meant that half-sized shinobi weren’t pounding their less eccentric local shinobi friend into the mattress as he begged for more, rather than the more likely scenario of him just having put up sound-proof seals for privacy so that unfortunate shinobi in the beer-soaked bar could only sit in horror and wonder whether it was happening or not.

 

Granted, for a shinobi, none of this was too odd. Well, it was odd, but being odd was practically in a shinobi’s nature. The very powerful shinobi, especially, tended to be an eccentric bunch as they lived and coped with the horrors that a shinobi’s life brought them.

 

In fact, compared to Maito Gai or even Kakashi, drowning your sorrows and angst in sex was a tried and true method of keeping the ghosts at bay. Not Obito’s preferred method, per se, he tended to wallow in his angst or else hide it beneath a self-deprecating grin that tried too hard, but a generally accepted form of coping.

 

Well, not with foreign ninja, that would be considered by Konoha to be a truly dangerous and unnecessary kink. But their chakra hemorrhaging seductive hairy-footed midget friend appeared to live on the wild side and was very likely one of those ninja that his hidden village just… put up with.

 

Well, if there was a village at all, he could be a missing nin, though he hadn’t struck Obito as that type. Then again, what with the ‘come take me, lover’ genjutsu he was throwing, it had been hard to get a read on him period. Or, perhaps, there weren’t hidden villages here period, similar to England where, for all that England was a community English wizards and witches were hardly ninja beholden to their nation-state.

 

Either way, all of this meant that Obito and Lee were still sitting in this run down civilian bar long after everyone had stumbled drunkenly into the night or disappeared upstairs, both staring awkwardly into space, while Obito questioned his sexuality.

 

Well, not really, now that the presence had… faded the undying love for Rin was there, tried and true as always. Even at the time he hadn’t wanted Rin less, in fact, the genjutsu almost brought that desire to the surface. As if, somehow by sleeping with that man or giving into his desires, Obito would finally somehow get Rin.

 

Still, he’d thought if he was ever going to question his sexuality, then it’d at least be for Kakashi and not for… whoever the hell this foreign jackass was.

 

“You know, if he wasn’t so short he probably wouldn’t have to try so hard,” Lee said, interrupting the silence as she nursed her glass, ignoring the glare of the bartender who no doubt wanted them to shut up, drink, pay, and leave already, “He’s not… bad looking.”

 

His big blue eyes and curling chestnut brown hair could have labeled him as adorable, granted, the hairy barefoot feet were goddamn weird, but if he’d been a little taller he’d be… cute, for some people that weren’t Obito.

 

“Even as short as he is I’m sure that someone is… into that,” Lee added, probably thinking that if there was enough money involved, or certainly enough charisma, then anyone could be into just about anything.

 

“But I am not one of them, shishou,” Obito retorted only for Lee to nod and agree.

 

“Oh, no, neither am I, I like my men tall, muscular, and…”  


“And looking eerily like Minato-sensei?” Obito finished for her with a sly smile, to which Lee whacked him on the back of his head but didn’t contradict him for all that they both knew it was true. Lee’s constant devotion and near worship of Minato-sensei perhaps surpassed even Obito’s overwhelming feelings for Rin.

 

And Obito’s feelings for Rin, which he would admit bordered on obsession at times, were a very high bar.

 

Unfortunately, this halted the limited conversation in its tracks and left Lee and Obito both staring at the walls and the fireplace, wishing something would happen to distract from… Well, Obito’s eyes drifted to the ceiling, still worryingly silent, that.

 

Finally, Obito noted the obvious with, “Well, so it seems like, at least, there are some… shinobi-like people here.”

 

Lee nodded, not paying him nearly as much attention as she should, but Obito could hardly blame her. He wondered if she was wondering just what was going on upstairs as well. He wouldn’t put it past her.

 

“I suppose we should find out where the hidden villages are or if there are hidden villages at all, then, right shishou?” and Lee nodded again, as that, after all, was really the crux of why they had come in the first place.

 

Sure, observation was nice, as was picking up new technology, languages, and ideas, but it was the idea of trade with other foreign hidden villages, in technology and techniques, that had been at the heart of Lee’s space-time ANBU division.

 

“But we don’t reach out to them,” Obito said, jerking his thumb upstairs, as now that he was no longer at the… center of the half-sized shinobi’s attention he had no desire to be there again any time soon. That sort of focus, attention, and pull from another shinobi was… unnerving to say the least.

 

“Not if you want to keep your pants,” Lee agreed, causing Obito to flush, but not refute, because even with the sharingan keeping him from melting into a puddle of goo at the first brush of chakra against his skin, that had been intense.

 

It was right about then, right after Lee had said those fateful words, that the door was kicked in. A group of dark, cloaked, shinobi, faceless beneath their hoods and fingers curved and fitted with heavy almost English styled armor, chakra laced with more killing intent than Obito had even felt in Orochimaru after a conversation with Lee, stepped inside and towered over the now rightfully cowering inn-keeper sitting by the entryway.

 

Shadows seemed to curl and wave at their feet, the roaring fire in the fireplace flickered then died and all the candles blew out, their very presence brought a miasma that smelled of death, decay, and something more unnatural and horrifying than either.

 

Obito, counting his breaths and heartbeats, silently loosened the strings of the pouch of kunai at his waist and gripped the metal hilt of the first and pulled it out into his right hand. Lee, for her own part, while she watched with bright green eyes, kept one hand curled around the handle of her glass.

 

The ninja at the head of the group stepped forward, the metal of his sandal clinking against the wooden floorboards, echoing like the clang of blades in the tense silence. The shadow his hood cast was so dark and so deep that his face was not merely covered by shadow but seemed not to be a face at all, but instead a dark pit where a face should be, a face made from shadows. Soon he stood directly over the inn-keeper, an English styled katana drawn and pointed at the man’s quivering civilian throat and said two wretched words in a voice that was so cold and inhuman that it could have very well been the wind itself speaking, “Shire, Baggins _._ ”

 

The man spluttered some desperate response, pointed upstairs, but the cloaked men in the doorway did not move up the stairs, instead they turned, almost as one, to look directly at Obito and Lee drinking beer like shmucks in the bar.

 

“Oh, shit,” Lee concluded, rather nicely, as the English katana were drawn with great inhuman cries and the cloaked shinobi began to glide towards them.

 

Lee and Obito immediately jumped up, kicked their table towards the group in tandem (who as expected neatly chopped the obstacle in half with their katana wreathed in living shadows), and began flinging out kunai which…

 

Which they didn’t even bother to dodge, but rather seemed to suck themselves into the shadows beneath their cloaks, as if instead of bodies these men were made from black holes that could not bleed or be injured but only pull matter inside and assimilate it into their own wretched form.

 

With that failure, Obito went through the hand seals for the familiar Uchiha fireball attack, and blew out a great fireball between his fingertips, forcing their dark opponents to glide back with a great inhuman shriek, the kind that tore at your very soul to hear it, then he and Lee were crashing through the glass of the window and sprinting out into the night.

 

Unfortunately, their new friends were not far behind, moving swiftly out the ruined door and onto great dark, red eyed, and seemingly rabid horses with a practiced ease.

 

As they sprinted, Lee created a great wall of earth behind them in the street, blocking the shinobi’s path, but Obito glanced back and in dismay saw that they had vaulted over the wall and were now racing across unstable, crumbling rooftops of neighboring buildings, somehow gaining on Lee and Obito despite riding horses.

 

“Do they have nin-horses?” Obito gasped out as they sprinted, “Are nin-horses a thing now?!”

 

Let it be known that Obito refused to allow nin-horses to be a thing, because the very idea of horses that could travel at shinobi speeds, was one of the most terrifying things he’d ever heard of.

 

Feeling a little desperate as he watched Lee’s futon jutsus be deflected or dodged in turn by their shadowy katana, the shinobi urging their nin-horses harder to overtake Lee and Obito, a few behind and a few ahead, closing in on them like wolves, Obito decided that it was probably time to go big or go home.

 

Obito didn’t have too many, but there were a few chakra-hemorrhaging jutsus that he had up his sleeve that caused considerable collateral damage on a good day. It wasn’t something you used on a whim, and certainly wasn’t something he’d ever pulled out in every major fight, but it was damn impressive, distracting, and usually sent even the most persistent of pursuers running for cover.

 

With that thought, closing his eyes, Obito concentrated and began to fly through Minato-sensei’s old translated hand-seals for the dark, chakra sucking, English jutsu fiendfyre. With a great cry he then leaned forward and down, watching as Lee did the same, and summoned chakra through to his fingertips then out in light and fire in the form of a great crane. The crane cried out into the night, fueled by chakra, desperation, and Obito’s buried rage, its wings expanded, feathers brushing the tips of crumbling rooftops and lighting even the most rain drenched on fire. There was that hideous shrieking again from the nin, the whinnying of their nin-horses and the sound of their sudden stops before the crane as it stared down at them with eyes made of fire and memories.

 

Obito and Lee vaulted over the village walls into the night as the crane flew towards their pursuers, blocking their path, then flying off into the night and dissipating as Obito forced the chakra connection closed and his rage back into a corner of his mind and heart until some other day.

 

Already he could hear his heart pounding in his head, that light-headedness that came with a sudden and significant drop in chakra, but he and Lee kept running off and into the rain-soaked hills at a pace that was torturous even for shinobi.

 

Soon they were stopped, perched on the tips of dark pine trees, staring out into the dark and the rain with kunai in hand.

 

“Hunter nin,” Lee finally concluded even as glowing green eyes searched the dark, hunting for their shadowy pursuers, waiting until they either passed by, gave up the chase, or caught their scent, “Hunter nin from some local hidden village on the tail of this Shire Baggins.”

 

Obito nodded, then paused, wondering, “And they think one of us is Shire Baggins?”

 

“It seems like it, likely they’ll realize their mistake or at least lose our trail, our scent must be all over the place in the rain not to mention our tracks are…” she trailed off, narrowed her eyes, and swore, “Shit, they are persistent bastards.”

 

Obito groaned, watched as the horses appeared, headed straight towards them without the slightest bit of hesitation, as if they knew exactly where Obito and Lee were without even having to look, “They must be tracking us with chakra.”

 

Lee said nothing, merely stood, perfectly balanced on the highest tip of the great tree and reached out with a hand to send out a wave and fire and light towards their shadowy friends below. Then, without a word, while their pursuers were distracted trying to keep themselves from being lit on fire, she and Obito were sprinting back in the direction of the village, doubling over any trail they’d left behind.

 

Of course, this didn’t work.

 

Days of wading through rivers and streams, doubling back, splitting up, and keeping chakra at a low and dim hum produced feeble results of throwing them off for an hour, maybe two or three, only to see them returning in full force as if they had never lost the trail at all.

 

It was like, he thought, having Lee herself on your trail. That dogged, unstoppable, determination which had never truly lost any fight and never truly lost a target. They said, that if Eru Lee was after you, then all hope was lost.

 

Either way, Obito, even in hostile territory in the war, didn’t remember having this much difficulty shaking anyone off his tail.

 

Days without sleep, or sleep caught in patches of a few hours at a time with either him or Lee standing watch, and Obito could feel himself slowing down. Worse, nothing seemed to even touch these guys, fire and light would deter them, rivers they wouldn’t cross directly but would instead hunt for the nearest bridge, but kunai did nothing to them and even the attacks which held them at bay offered a few hours reprieve at best.

 

Obito would have been very impressed if it wasn’t his ass they were hunting.

 

“Who are those guys?” Obito, panting, leaning against a jagged rock in the middle of a sandbank of a slowly moving river, the closest thing he and Lee had managed to find for shelter from these bastards shook his head back and forth in exhausted dismay.

 

“Seriously, nin-horses, why don’t we have nin-horses? If we don’t have nin-horses they don’t get to have nin-horses…” he trailed off, breathing out, eyes fluttering shut and a wry, weak, smile forming on his lips, “I shouldn’t have used _fiendfyre_ , that was… Too much too soon, of course, I thought if they saw a giant bird made of vengeful fire they’d think, ‘holy shit, that’s foreign and terrifying and maybe I don’t want to tangle with these bastards’, but no, no, that just seemed to encourage them…”

 

“It was a nice thought,” Lee said, far less exhausted than him, but then Lee could go for days, days, and days and maybe even months without stopping. Obito though, Obito was getting tired.

 

“It’s like they don’t even mind the possibility of being lit on fire,” Obito added with a small, hoarse, chuckle, “Shishou, I think, next time we see them, you should light them on fire.”

 

“Tried that already,” Lee responded, which was true, she’d tried multiple times, but the lucky bastards had always just shrieked and run away. Or, well, one of them she’d managed to light on fire, and he’d screamed something awful, but he’d been right there back in the fray only a few hours later so clearly third-degree burns were not something he cared about.

 

“Alright, but maybe… I don’t know, crush them into dust or something, you’re good at that, shishou,” Obito said, more than certain, in his exhausted state, that if Lee really wanted to, she could make an example of these stupid local hunter nin jackasses who couldn’t tell a Shire Baggins from an Eru Lee if it kicked them in the face.

 

Or, well, the general hood area, Obito still hadn’t seen a face from beneath whatever that shadowy genjutsu was that they insisted on casting at every conceivable moment.

 

“That’s a little too many cards up my sleeves than I’d want to reveal to their masters or whatever other shinobi might be watching,” Lee noted darkly, and there was some exhaustion in her voice at least, that she too was reaching the edge of some kind of a limit, “No teleportation, and no drastic measures, at least not until things are really drastic.”

 

“This isn’t drastic?” Obito asked, eyes wide and opened as he turned his head towards her, but she just smiled at him.

 

“I’d call this… obnoxious,” she settled on with her infuriating smile.

 

Obito, just shook his head, eyes closing and trying not to think that even if they were in the middle of a river they’d likely have to move again in only a few hours which was not nearly enough time for his chakra to recover, “We can’t keep doing this, I need sleep I need…”  


Lee said nothing, instead sat next to him so that she was shoulder to shoulder with him, staring out at the winding tranquil river they had taken refuge in, glittering in the afternoon sunlight, “They’re looking for Shire Baggins, they’ve mistaken us for him and…”

 

Her eyes widened, a realization clear within their green depths, Obito, looking at her with the slightest bit of apprehension asked, “What is it?”

 

“Do you think… Do you think Shire Baggins is our half-sized shinobi friend from the village?”

 

Obito paused, opened his mouth, closed it, and began to reach the conclusion that Lee herself had undoubtedly come to. They run into a shinobi whose power, or at least the sheer amount of it, in some sense seemed to rival Uzumaki Kushina’s if not Lee’s. He doesn’t run from the bar they’re in, or seem to pay them any true mind, instead seems to want them to get as close as possible to him….

 

“That bastard put them off his trail and onto ours!” Obito cried out, his words startling the birds in the trees into a nervous panic.

 

Goddammit, that was clever, backhanded and terrible, not that this was a bad thing in shinobi, but goddamn was it clever. These assholes clearly had no concept of what Shire Baggins looked like, they were tracking by chakra alone, but they were impossibly good at tracking by chakra alone.

 

So, they track him to a bar in the middle of civilian nowhere where surely no other shinobi of great power is going to be lurking about, where they see Lee and Obito sitting there like shmucks, they see Lee and think…

 

“That magnificent bastard is using us as a scapegoat!” Obito continued, oh, dammit all he was good.

 

There wasn’t much more to say than that because they were already back, there at the edge of the river shrieking at them like demented harpies, waving their swords about and clearly preparing themselves find a way to ford the river and get to his and Lee’s cozy sandbar.

 

“You’re looking for a midget, you stupid bastards!” Obito shouted at them as he stood, flinging a kunai at them much to their shrieking annoyance, just as ineffective as throwing rocks at their heads, “A barefoot, alarmingly seductive, bastard of a midget!”

 

“Don’t waste kunai, Obito,” Lee chided, but not with too much heart, probably realizing Obito was past the point of reason.

 

Obito just kept screaming, his voice hoarse, but his words tearing themselves from his throat, “If you wasted less chakra on that dumbass shadow genjutsu then maybe you’d have some chakra left to recognize the difference between a midget and a normal sized human being! You stupid, horse riding, assholes!”

 

This was followed by a wordless, exhausted, cry of rage on his own part that was met in time by their own wretched shrieks. Finally, both he, and they, stopped with Lee giving Obito a rather flat and dry look.

 

“It had to be said, shishou,” Obito defended, not that Lee seemed to buy this, but she said nothing, merely sent out another wave of fire and light towards their pursuers and then dashed across the river water and into the forest with Obito at her side.

 

This time though, they darted from tree to tree not simply away from their new friends, but towards that other bright source of chakra that slowly but steadily headed east through the forest, at a leisurely, civilian, and almost mocking pace. Like he had all the time in the world to get where he was going and watch Lee and Obito run around like chickens with their heads cut off.

 

It was night by the time they caught up to him, having to dodge and lose the hunter nin twice before that point.

 

And there he was, up on a hill of what looked like the ruins of an old stone watchtower, lighting a fire as if he was out camping like any happy academy brat with all his half-sized civilian friends. Lee and Obito, cold, exhausted, hearts pounding and muscles aching, could only stare up at that cute little fire burning in the distance and feel a dull and mutual rage.

 

“That is, without a doubt, the most gauche and magnificent bastard of a shinobi I have ever seen,” Lee repeated, as if she was almost in awe, but too far gone in her own rage and offense to go that far.

 

“He’s mocking us,” Obito said flatly, without inflection, as if he could not quite believe the words himself, “That half-sized son of a bitch is mocking us.”

 

“Not for long he’s not,” Lee muttered. Then, without another word, she dashed towards the hill, keeping low in fields of wheat, little more than a shadow to the eye of whoever kept watch up in the tower. Obito watched as there was some sort of a commotion, voices crying out in surprise and the fire flickering as if someone was trying to stamp it out, then a great beam of light appeared on the top of the hill, a beacon for anyone and their brother to see, and Eru Lee’s chakra rang out like a single beautiful cry into the dark. He heard the cries of the hunter nin, the thundering hooves of their horses towards the hill, then watched as Lee, jumped down from the hill and darted back towards Obito still waiting in the underbrush.

 

“I too, Obito,” Lee said with shark like grin as they listened to the terrified human cries in the dark against those of the hunter nin, “Can be a truly magnificent bastard.”


	3. Chapter 3

_Part 3: The shinobi’s gambit does not pay off, Obito succumbs to chakra exhaustion, and our shinobi heroes meet the infamous Lord of the Rings._

* * *

 

 

They waited for three days, Obito slowly but surely recovering chakra from the chase, at an abysmal pace given both his and Lee’s lack of medical expertise as well as the sheer amount of chakra Obito had depleted, and at the end of day three with their hunter nin not in sight he and Lee both breathed a sigh of relief that the chase, at last, appeared to be over.

 

“Thank god,” Obito said as they made their way finally, with ridiculous smiles on both of their faces, to the main worn road that clearly lead from one village to another and headed east upon it, “I don’t think I could have handled another day of that.”

 

“I think you could manage a day, but two or three, well then we’d be in hot water,” Lee corrected, shouldering her pack higher as they continued on their merry way, still looking desperately out of place compared to all of the staring locals they passed.

 

“We have got to get new clothes,” Obito muttered after they passed yet another gawking civilian, passing them slowly and looking over his shoulder even as he drove his mule laden cart westward towards the ruined village they had left behind.

 

Not that it would help too much, they clearly didn’t speak the local language, and it wouldn’t help the fact that Lee with her red hair and him with his scars and mismatched eyes and even facial features looked markedly different than every civilian they had passed thus far. Still, at least it would stop some of the staring.

 

“I wonder how Shire Baggins is fairing,” Obito mused, it was hard to tell, they hadn’t after all seen much of the man’s skill set. Clearly an expert in genjutsu to an absurd degree, and he certainly leaked enough chakra all over the place to be dangerous. However, he’d clearly been on the run from the hunter nin, and that meant that he too had tried and failed to drive them off before pouncing on the oblivious Lee and Obito.

 

Of course, that could simply be the easier solution, as if he disposed of those hunter nin whatever village was after him would likely just replace them and their nin horses with a newer stronger batch, so better to have a dead Lee represent a dead Shire Baggins than Shire Baggins himself on the run for the rest of his likely short life.

 

“That fight in the watch tower did not seem to be going well when we left,” Lee noted, and it hadn’t, it had actually been going very poorly as Shire Baggins didn’t seem to have realized that katon jutsus were about the only way to drive the bastards off even for a few hours.

 

“Still, at least we know there’s something like a hidden village in this place and people like shinobi,” Obito said, and very quickly too, Lee and Obito hadn’t expected to stumble across any chakra wielding societies that quickly given how the English hid themselves from the world.

 

Whether they were really shinobi or not, although their hunter nin friends and Shire Baggins all but screamed shinobi, was almost beside the point for now.

 

“That is a definite plus,” Lee agreed with a nod of her head and a small smile.

 

After that they fell into a comfortable silence, walking eastward along the road and staring out into the morning sunlight and the fields glittering with dew. It really was, Obito thought to himself, a beautiful country filled with forests, fields, and mountains rising upwards in the east…

 

Without the chase he could finally appreciate the landscape they had found themselves in, far different than the many barren worlds that they could have arrived on, or any of Obito’s preconceived ideas of what his and Lee’s brave new world might look like.

 

An in human, soul wrenching, shriek sounded from behind them.

 

Slowly, as one, he and Lee turned to where on the path behind them, a mile or so away, stood the ninja in black atop their great black horses.

 

“Oh no,” Obito said slowly as the sight of them sunk into his mind, “They didn’t take the bait.”

 

Three days, for three days they had taken the bait, or rather, not taken Shire Baggins’ bait presented so kindly to them. However, now they had returned in even greater numbers than before, nine Obito counted, nine hunter nin on their tail, and nothing stood between them but an open road.

 

Lee wasted no time, sending out another great katon jutsu to block their path as she and Obito sprinted off the road and back into the forests once again, darting from tree to tree back towards a river, as Obito could feel his barely recovered chakra straining.

 

“Shishou,” he said when they finally reached the river, wading to its center so that the water reached waist height, Obito no longer having the chakra to spare to water walk for hours at a time or however long it would take them to appear again. It was cold, so very cold, likely water from the mountains and glaciers that had melted, and Obito could feel his lower half going numb and his scars aching desperately, “You know this will only hold them for a few hours, even a river will only hold them for a few hours, we can’t… We can’t outrun them.”

 

Not forever, a few hours at a time was not forever, and Obito was not Eru Lee. She could keep going, god knew how she could keep going but she could, long after Obito dropped dead of chakra exhaustion she would be able to keep going…

 

“No,” Lee agreed, closing her eyes and letting out a shuddering breath, “We can’t outrun them.”

 

Her eyes, when they opened, were bright and green and sharp as kunai, “We can’t outrun them, and we can’t outfight them.”

 

Teeth chattering, shivering, he crossed his arms and asked, “What do we do now?”

 

Go home? Go home already with nothing to show for it except hunter nin? It was a thought, an almost embarrassing one, but it was that or Lee choosing to damn everything and grab the attention of a truly powerful village should she wipe out their fleet of hunter nin.

 

Obito couldn’t really see any other legitimate option.

 

However, Lee, staring out into the distance suggested anything but this, “We surrender.”

 

“Surrender, are you mad, shishou?” Obito asked, “We have no idea where we’ll end up.”

 

“A hidden village, or something like it, where we will at least see our enemy face to face,” Lee said, “Then, we can run and go home or stay and fight when we know exactly what it is we’re up against. We run any further and you’ll have no chakra left, we go home now, and we’ll never be able to come back. Surrendering is our best choice.”

 

“Do you want to be tortured into submission?” Obito asked, “Because I don’t, and they seem like the torturing type!”

 

“It won’t come to that,” Lee assured, with far too much confidence than was appropriate for this sort of conversation.

 

“Of course, it will come to that,” Obito spat, “Even in Konoha it would come to that. Shishou, you can’t guarantee that you can take down an entire village’s torture and interrogation unit, an entire village period, by yourself.”

 

“Better to be a trojan horse than to pick off hunter nin one by one with techniques far too powerful far too early,” Lee then lifted herself up, out of the water and onto its surface, casting herself dry with a wave of her hand, “It will be fine, Obito, I promise it will be fine.”

 

He wanted to doubt that, every part of him screamed at him to doubt it, but the truth was that his faith in Eru Lee was alarming at times. She had pulled him out of hell once, and he had never forgotten it. He would always be that fourteen-year-old boy in a cave, watching as Lee, the last person he would ever have expected, came for him. That boy would always believe in Eru Lee.

 

So, he just squeezed his eye shut and gritted his teeth, waiting as Lee sent out another shockwave of power, a bright beacon to summon anyone and everyone towards them, and waited as the sound of hooves and shrieking became audible.

 

Then there they were, nine in number on the bank of the river, hissing and shrieking at them as they waved their swords.

 

Both Lee and Obito, slowly, very slowly, raised their hands over their head and it was Lee, voice laced in genjutsu, who spoke, “We surrender. Take us back to your village, my apprentice and I surrender.”

 

They did not move, did not even seem to have heard her but Lee kept staring, eyes blazing as chakra laced itself into her voice, “You will harm neither of us, we will go peacefully, and you will take us back to your village!”

 

Here, finally, they hesitated, but they did not look to one another for reassurance or debate as any other shinobi might have. They just stared at her, at Lee standing on top of the water, eyes burning and hair flying in any and every direction from her deteriorating braid. Then, slowly, as slowly as Lee and Obito had first put their hands into the air, they parted down the center to leave a small but clear path for Lee and Obito.

 

Lee tugged Obito up onto the top of the water, pulled him with her with her hands held high, until they were standing on the rocky bank. In the sunlight their swords did not gleam as they should, they weren’t dulled by use either, instead they seemed almost to drip with a strange poisonous miasma that wreaked of death and decay as they themselves did.

Even standing next to one, staring into the dark hood, Obito could not see his face.

 

One moved a sword to strike down at Lee but was blocked by a force field around them, containing Lee and Obito to an impenetrable bubble. Lee did not even look at the sword, instead kept her attention on the rider in the center, the apparent leader of the squad, “You will harm neither of us and we will go peacefully.”

 

They took that in silence, as they took everything in silence, to the point that Obito would have wondered if they were capable of speech were it not for that wretched “Shire, Baggins” that had started this whole mess. Then, slowly, tenseness in every motion, they surrounded them in a circle, cutting off Obito and Lee’s avenues of escape.

 

Obito shuddered, shivering even as Lee used a jutsu to dry him, chakra leaking out of him by the second but none the less moved forward silently with Lee as they were herded, slowly at first, then faster and faster until they were moving once again at a jonin’s sprint eastward through the trees and then back onto the road.

 

They ran through the day then through the night, and at sunrise Obito could feel the lead in his legs and lungs as he asked, “How can they keep going? How do they keep going without stopping?”

 

Perhaps it was the horses, that certainly would help, but it had been days and days of them chasing first Lee and Obito then Shire Baggins then Lee and Obito again. Lee could do that, Lee was doing it, but no one was Lee and even Lee was feeling the strain as her chakra control slipped further and further for each minute on the run.

 

They didn’t slow down, and at this point surrounded on all sides with nowhere left to turn, Lee and Obito didn’t dare to.

 

That afternoon he began to stumble tripping forward and caught by Lee time and again, and each time he told himself that he had to keep going, that he had always kept going. His life had been this moment, moving to the point of agony and still going because there was no other choice, because to do anything less was to betray everything he believed in…

 

Visions of Kakashi and Rin haunted him as he ran, that final moment at the cave in, just before they had taken his eye and given it to Kakashi, his last gift and his last request of both of his teammates. Yes, this was not harder than that moment, could not be harder than that moment because that moment had killed everything Obito had ever been.

 

The road stretched before them, trees and hills giving way to mountains thick with snow and glaciers and a gap between them, then great fields of golden wheat and pale grass, horses whinnying in the distance while he found himself leaning more and more on Lee until at some point she’d thrown him over her shoulders and carried him even as they ran, somehow still at the same pace despite carrying more than twice her own weight.

 

His head lulled against her shoulder, and though her gait was smooth every once in a while his eyes would flutter open, catch sight of her practically glowing with chakra even while the hunter nin screamed and screeched at the sight of her while still pressing in on all sides.

 

“I told you surrendering was a bad idea,” he murmured with a smile against her ear, but he fell back into that dazed doze before she could answer, only with the dull thought that perhaps they should have suckered some poor medic nin into their extra-dimensional escapades.

 

Yes, if they’d had a medic nin, then everything would be better or at least not be quite so bad.

 

Probably the nidaime would have tagged along, likely expected to tag along once actual politics became a thing, although imagining his face with Shire Baggins, Shire Baggins the barefoot seductive midget in a bar… Oh sage, even though his lungs and his head hurt almost more than he could stand he was laughing.

 

Lee’s skin was hot, hotter than it should be, or perhaps Obito was cold or overheated himself, it was hard to tell. Still, he was almost certain she was glowing, and that the riders had given them at least some wider berth because of it.

 

The landscape changed, the fields vanished, and great rocky plains and a river began to appear in the distance along with a newer barren set of mountains. There was a wind from the south east which brought the smell of sulfur and ash, the sky in the mornings became an ominous if beautiful red, and Obito staring at it couldn’t help but wonder if they were headed into the mouth of hell.

 

He didn’t remember passing through this next set of mountains, only flashes of great black gates as high as the mountain range themselves made of some unfamiliar dark metal, and then a tower standing over a barren wasteland, a great, all seeing eye of fire staring down upon them from the top.

 

And Obito wondered, even as he stared, if it was red because it too was made of the sharingan or something like it. Something that could see through time and space itself to the very inner workings of the universe…

 

Misshapen men and women, with grayed flesh, jagged shark like teeth, and greedy black eyes marked their progress with sneers that hungered for their flesh. Banging against their shields and howling at the sight of them even as Lee and him on her shoulders were forced up into the tower.

 

And there as they climbed higher and higher in the narrow, black, spiral stair case with heat and sulfur in the air as if even here they were standing next to an open flame, Obito could hear a great and terrible voice reverberating down the walls in an unfamiliar and somehow terrible language.

 

“ _Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul,_ ” it sang, both beautiful, great, and terrible much in the way that Eru Lee was beautiful, great, and terrible…

 

And in his mind, translated poorly, Eru Lee’s words rang out, taken from 2010: A Space Odyssey and the last words of HAL who had embraced his own destruction and dreamless death, “All these worlds are yours – except Europa. Attempt no landing there.”

 

Against Lee’s ear he murmured weakly, “We should never have come here.”

 

She said nothing, shifted him higher on her back and continued climbing, climbing until they entered what appeared to be a throne room empty of a king. Lee’s eyes wandered upwards up and up to the top of the tower where Obito could feel the sight of that eye weighing down upon them.

 

It spoke without a mouth, without a voice, yet it spoke all the same two songs at the same time. One a question which neither he nor Lee knew how to answer, the other, that chanting call that sang power and faith into something.

 

And yet, when Obito’s eyes closed, it was not Madara’s face he saw or the own demented face he could have worn if no one had ever come for him, if Rin had died in Kiri and Obito had been left with nothing. No, it was Lee, entering the cave, hair wild and red, eyes burning as they always burned, the second sun rising when it was least expected.

 

So even as they stood there, Obito slumped over his master like a rag doll, desperately needing rest and chakra in equal measure, he didn’t lose faith and could almost feel Lee’s grin as she put it together with a delighted laugh.

 

“He wants a body, my god, all he wants is a body!”

 

Obito smiled even as he felt the chakra thrumming through Lee’s body, outward and upward towards the eye, as she performed the one task that no one had ever expected and no one ever would. And in this dark tower and barren wasteland she was a star, blinding and brilliant, forcing the wraith of horsemen and demented soldiers back into the shadows with cries of terror and awe.

 

And just before Obito’s eyes drifted shut again he took in the dimming light and the form of a dark-haired man, pale and shivering on the stone floor, looking up at her with wonder and the faint glimmerings of fear, “ _Nalkriuk ayh lat?_ ”

 

Who are you?

 

“I am Eru Lee, destroyer of worlds.”


	4. Chapter 4

_Part 4: Obito is put on bedrest in what is the best of Mordor’s guest rooms but still seems more ominous than comfortable, the language barrier is approached and poked at, and our shinobi protagonists find the worst possible friend in the most unlikely of places._

* * *

 

Obito was not quite the connoisseur of chakra exhaustion that Kakashi had become, the burden of Obito’s final gift, but there had been times when he had gone past that edge and started the dangerous spiral downward that, if untreated, led to death.

 

Madara had been a fan of chakra exhaustion. Not only did it keep Obito weak and relatively pliant, it also weakened him to genjutsu, and slowly ground down on his soul as he shivered in the dark, his life draining from him inch by inch only to be recovered then brought back again. Since then, since Lee had come for him in that cave, he’d only ever been close to the edge of clinical chakra exhaustion.

 

Until now, that is.

 

He felt so heavy, his limbs like metal weights, impossible to lift or move, even his eyelids seemed weighted. Everything was duller, more distant, his mind on the edge of sleep and lingering in memories of where he could be and perhaps should be.

 

Konoha, a part of him thought at first, the hospital. Then it was too dark for Konoha, too dark and too warm for a hospital, or a campsite at night… The cave then, always when he first came back from chakra exhaustion there’d be that terrible beautiful hope that he was home only to open his eyes and see Zetsu (white, black, didn’t matter) leering down at him with an inhuman grin.

 

But the air was far too hot for the cave, Obito sweating under sparse blankets as if in a fever, like a second sun was there right outside his window. More, the air smelled like sulfur, faintly of poisonous gasses, and with that he forced his eyes open.

 

The ceiling was dark and vaulted, like an English cathedral, but made of a pitch-black stone harder and more intimidating than any marble or granite. Staring up at it was almost like staring down into a well where one could not see the bottom, where it went down and down into a perfect blackness.

 

Tilting his head slightly to the left he noted a small window, staring out into the sky bleeding red and orange in the perpetual twilight of this place, a volcano spewing ash and smoke and lava at a distance that was far too close for comfort amid smaller more benign yet barren mountains.

 

“Good, you’re awake,” Lee’s hand fell on his shoulder, still strangely warm to the touch, and looking over Obito could see that it was glowing ever so slightly. Turning his body slowly, with great effort, over to his right he saw Lee sitting an artfully carved wooden chair, blocking the entryway to the room.

 

Her skin was smudged with dirt and sweat, dark circles beneath her eyes, her hair matted in places, mostly springing out of the braid it had started in and winding its way in all directions with the heat of this place, beneath the layer of dirt her skin glowed an unnatural white and her eyes burned, her chakra bleeding from her skin in a way Obito had never seen before, his only guess was that this was what chakra exhaustion looked like for her.

 

Staring at her, looking past her and taking in the doorway barricaded by intimidating visible golden threads of chakra, he asked in a voice rough and aching, “How long?”

 

“Two days since we arrived,” Lee said, “I’ve been giving you chakra at what I think is safe doses.”

 

So conservative then, Lee was notorious for having never studied much beyond the basics of medical jutsus. Not that Obito himself was much better. Where Rin would know how much or how little at any given moment to pump into him, and have the fine-tuned control to pull it off, Lee who already had vastly different chakra reservoirs compared to any shinobi, did not.

 

With him looking at her she tossed him an apple from a bowl that had been sitting on an ornately carved desk on the far side of the room, taking one for herself as well and munching on it as she watched him slowly but surely do the same, savoring the taste.

 

It had been too long since that pub, if a single apple could taste this divine.

 

“When’s rendezvous?” he asked between bites, trying to pull himself up into a sitting position, failing on his own and waiting for Lee to help push him up with her own hands.

 

“We have a few weeks,” Lee said as she stepped back and into her seat, wiping away at the sleep in her own eyes even as she munched, “We could take you home now but I don’t want to risk that kind of a jump when you’re like this, not to mention, I’d rather not display that kind of tangible ability to our host.”

 

Obito could only nod shortly, watching as she made both her and his apple cores vanish into thin air, and try to think of when exactly he’d be moving again. If watching Kakashi gave him anything to go by, as well as his own more limited experiences, waking up was usually the hardest part. Getting limited movement on crutches would be next, but it was still movement, and it should only be a day or so until he was capable of that. However, at that point it’d be at least a week until he was on his feet again and fully ready for battle.

 

Not that he would look forward to any battle in this state, especially not with anyone as competent as those hunter nin.

 

His eyes moved to Lee, softened as he once again took in her disheveled state, and he asked, “Have you slept at all, shishou?”

 

She gave him a rather rueful smile, and it was clear that the answer was no, that Lee hadn’t slept, ate, drank, or done anything human at all for god only knew how many days. No wonder she was barely looking human.

 

It was such an oddly domestic moment, granted in this foreign hidden village and dark kage tower, him lying in this bed and her sitting across from it. Yet it was at times like this, where she barely seemed contained by her own skin, that he couldn’t even begin to doubt Eru Lee’s strange claim that she was a god in mortal flesh.

 

A shadow in the entryway caught Obito’s eye, he looked over, head resting against the headboard and there was the man that Obito assumed was their strange host. He was a relatively tall man, taller than Obito certainly as well as Lee, though not quite Jiraiya’s height or the English nin’s. His hair was dark and wavy, the sort of blue-black with feathered almost curling texture that had always belonged to the Uchiha clan, and fell down to his waist. His skin, pale, his eyes a strange shifting blue that held both shades almost black for their darkness and bright pinpricks that were almost white like stars. He held himself with an uncertainty that seemed to belie his own nature, as if the authority of a kage was far more natural and suited to him, and the idea of taking caution or standing on uncertain ground with anyone was an anathema to him.

 

He was also, hands down, the most beautiful person Obito had ever seen in his life.

 

Obito knew a lot about beautiful people, the clan was notoriously filled with disgustingly beautiful people that sent throngs of adolescent girls into manic fits in the academy. Solely by being an Uchiha, Obito himself (before being subjected to a cave in and then Madara’s tender mercies) could likely have expected to be at least fairly good looking. This man, however, would make the entire clan look like a bunch of garbage eating crows without even trying.

 

Even Lee, who Obito generally considered rather attractive if very foreign and exotic looking, was looking rather mangey by comparison (although this likely wasn’t helped by the dirt, the crackling visible chakra, the hair, and the fact that she hadn’t slept for at least a week).

 

As it was, Obito suspected that while the man wasn’t actively not trying, his dark silken robes appeared to be something of a minimal effort for him and he still looked like an angel descended from the heavens.

 

Lee gave Obito a rather knowing look, no doubt she had noticed the same thing, probably gotten more of an eyeful than Obito had, as the last Obito remembered of seeing this man he’d been on the floor of his throne room without clothes. Obito, fortunately or unfortunately, had been too busy slipping into unconsciousness to care at the time.

 

Obito shook away the thought and tried to focus, the man wasn’t anything to sneeze at, easily more powerful than their dark-haired chunin friend from the rainy village (the poor bastard, Obito wondered how much shame he’d felt waking up next to the half-sized perverted genjutsu specialist from hell). However, that said, while Obito would place him easily at a jonin through chakra alone he was far outclassed by Lee, their half-sized shinobi friend, and perhaps even Obito himself if he was at the top of his game.

 

Judging by the silent, assessing look on his face as his strange eyes (perhaps some kind of a dojutsu even) took in Lee then Obito in turn, he seemed perfectly aware of this, and by the bristling of his chakra he loathed it.

 

“ _Man erin_ ,” he said, and god, even his voice was unusually beautiful. A strange, ethereal, almost bell-like quality to it as if each word in itself was a song. So beautiful, in fact, that Obito could barely pay attention to the polite words in and of themselves, or even guess at their meaning.

 

Lee’s eyebrows rose ever so slightly, noting how close yet how far the man dared to stand from her wards, the studied impassiveness of his face, and with a quirk of her own lips repeated his words back to him, “ _Man erin, nin mellon._ ”

 

She then spared that same wry, amused, look towards Obito as she explained, “Our nameless friend and host insists on visiting each day to tell me hello, or good morning, I can’t tell. I think he believes he looks very polite, but he forgets that I’m not stupid enough to believe that each time he walks by here he’s not trying to crack my wards.”

 

“Has he succeeded?” Obito asked, eyes drifting to the man who didn’t seem to be looking at Lee’s wards, but seemed to be subtle enough to inspect them without giving any clue visible or otherwise.

 

“The first few times, yes,” Lee acknowledged, likely having used more conventional means to trap the room beforehand, “But this would keep even a determined Minato out.”

 

Which meant that they were seriously heavy duty (which Obito had suspected given their visible, chakra laden, nature) and likely one of those tricks that Lee alone could truly pull off, the kind that even a renowned fuinjutsu specialist would hesitate before poking.

 

Obito kept looking at him, the man had an incredible poker face. Perhaps part of this was that his face was beautiful to the point of being distracting, but even looking past that, the way he held himself and the way his features arranged themselves seemed like something he had long since practiced. It was in the subtle flares of his chakra, the slightest of shifts, that Obito could read him at all and even then Obito didn’t wonder if it was simply because the man was staring at Lee who put even the best off their game.

 

Obito’s eyes then narrowed, wishing he was recovered enough for the sharingan as he asked, “Was he really some kind of giant fiery eyeball before we showed up?”

 

“Apparently,” Lee said, before shrugging and noting, almost with hesitation, “Sometimes he still is, he… shifts back into it and starts ominously chanting at the top of the tower and out towards the west.”

 

Obito could only look at her, eyebrows raised, trying and failing to piece what she’d said together into a reasonable sentence.

 

“He’s a weird guy,” Lee concluded for Obito, that odd look of hesitance still on her face as if even she couldn’t quite believe what she was saying, “Still, as far as foreign kages go, rather nice.”

 

“Nice?” Obito balked and Lee nodded towards the bed, which was, indeed, quite nice. The sheets were made of a fine, expensive, fabric that even as a member of the Uchiha clan Obito had never been able to afford. The headboard itself was expertly carved and decorated as the chair was, likely by some master carpenter in ages past, far better than anything Obito could come up with or even the shodaime.

 

Point being, this wasn’t a prison cell or even a guest room, wherever he had put them was where you’d put very important guests you were trying to impress. Not foreign shinobi who tried to pull a trojan horse on you only to avert and bestow a body on you at the last minute.

 

“I didn’t even have to put a kunai to his neck for all of this,” Lee said, “No fuss, no torture, sent the hunter nin packing, brought you right here to this furnished room and let me set up shop and wards with only minimal flinching, has regularly supplied food and water, and makes sure to drop by each day to politely say good morning while he only subtly pokes at my defenses.”

 

Obito was about to note that this, in itself, was unbelievably suspicious as even the smallest and gentlest of villages were not this stupid regarding overpowered foreigners, but the man seemed to have had enough of being ignored as he asked, “ _Ceri-cin feel eithel?_ ”

 

Obito blinked, blinked again, then looked to Lee and said drily, “I suppose he doesn’t speak _English_ then or our own language?”

 

Lee sighed and shook her head, “Granted, I think he speaks around five others at least. He cycled through quite a few before we gave up entirely. He’s stuck with this one for whatever reason.”

 

Obito had vague recollections of that first language, as strangely lyrical, yet with a rougher discordant tone to each sentence. As if each word, each phrase, was made to curse the gods. Obito could see, in a strange way, how switching to this tongue would be considered more diplomatic.

 

The man’s eyebrows furrowed, only slightly, the only sign of his own impatience as he listened to Obito and Lee continue their back and forth in their own native tongue.

 

“Do you know what he said?” Obito asked.

 

“I’m guessing he’s asking if you’re with the land of the living yet,” Lee said entirely too casually, “Every time he’s walked by so far to chit chat you’ve looked all but dead to the world. In fact, I’m pretty sure he asked me if you were dead at some point and if I was a grieving widow, but it was a bit hard to tell.”

 

Somehow, Obito doubted the man had asked quite that, or was being as tactless as Lee herself was being about it.

 

All the same Lee turned to their host and nodded, along with a wishy-washy hand wave motion to indicate that while Obito was on the mend he was hardly ready to run marathons.

 

The man’s lips quirked slightly, as if unwillingly amused, though his eyes remained distant and unreadable, like his eyes were made of the night sky and stars rather than any sort of human emotion, and he responded, in a tone that suggested that this was what Lee had meant to say, “ _Ho na-tríw._ ”

 

Obito was almost certain this lacked the colorful metaphors and pop-culture allusions that Lee, had she been fully fluent, would have indulged in. All the same Lee nodded, appeared to memorize this phrase and break it into pieces and then waited for the man to leave.

 

He didn’t though, he stayed and lingered, folded his arms into the sleeves of his dark robes and stared as if he didn’t have anywhere else to be or anything better to do. Glancing outside the window, again, Obito’s eyes traced the barren wasteland that formed this cradle between the mountains. There wasn’t a plant in sight, only stone, a barren city of jagged edges and this dark tower, the mountains, and pale gray forms that were the monstrous humanoid beings that Obito had seen when they first entered this place.

 

Even in daylight, the limited daylight that seemed to exist in this place, and even with his chakra recovering, Obito still wondered if this wasn’t a village hidden in Hell.

 

Finally, though, after a good number of minutes of staring at Lee with her staring right back, he moved with a poise, elegance, determination, and shinobi swiftness away from the doorway and out of sight. Then, something like an explosion of chakra from the top of the tower, the window filled briefly with almost blinding light, and then that dread song, “ _Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul…_ ”

 

“Every day,” Lee said, a note of amusement and wonder in her voice even as her eyes continued to stare upwards towards the ceiling and the great eye of fire resting beyond it, “Every day from sunrise until sunset, every hour and minute that he isn’t loitering in the doorway staring, he sits up there on that roof, in the form of a giant fiery eyeball of doom, and he sings.”

 

Obito looked up as well, as if without the sharingan he could see through the ceiling, but at her words he looked back down and couldn’t help but laugh. It wasn’t at all how he would have described it, and yet, he could hardly say that she was wrong.

 

“Weird guy,” Obito finally said to which Lee grinned and parroted, “Very weird guy.”

 

“Still, better him than the half-sized genjutsu specialist,” Obito said, and at that, at least, Lee laughed as well. Laughing almost so hard that she fell out of her chair, most likely spurred on more by exhaustion and relief than real humor.

 

“You should really sleep,” Obito said when she finally straightened, skin still crackling, eyes still burning with mirth and so very much chakra.

 

“I said he was nice,” Lee said with a fond smile and exhausted smile, “Not that I trusted him.”

 

Obito supposed it was just as well, already he was slipping back into sleep, eyelids fluttering. Tomorrow, he’d get up and be on crutches, he’d explore this tower with shishou, find something to eat that wasn’t an apple and finally get a shower, and give her a chance to rest. Yes, tomorrow, or the day after, he’d be ready to spend more than a few thoughts on their strange, generous, and absurdly pretty host.


	5. Chapter 5

_Part 5: Obito slowly but surely recovers and our shinobi protagonists explore the barren dystopia of Barad-dûr with their enigmatic host, misunderstandings are compounded and multiplied though not in the direction the Lord of the Rings would prefer, and an over ambitious Eru Lee decides to negotiate trade even with the heavily fortified language barrier still standing._

* * *

 

 

“Are you sure you’re fine?” Lee asked, eyeing him warily as Obito forced himself off from the bed and onto the crutches she provided, “Remember that I’m hardly a qualified medic nin.”

 

“I’m good enough,” Obito gritted out, and if he still didn’t feel like he could walk on his own two feet, and if everything still felt heavy and his head felt like it was filled with cotton, well, then he was good enough for this. Three and a half days of bedrest and he more than understood why Kakashi was always attempting to escape the hospital despite Rin and Tsunade-sama’s wrath.

 

As his mind had come back to him from the depths of chakra exhaustion so had nervousness, restlessness, and a need to get up and do something already. Every second longer he’d been sitting there staring at that ceiling or even playing shoji across from an exhausted and glowing Lee who still refused to sleep had felt like he was one more second closer to going completely mad.

 

Even the monotony and terror of Madara’s cave, where every moment had either been dull or horrifying, hadn’t filled him with this same aching impatience and burning need to just be well again. Of course, a large part of that was that Obito, while determined and ambitious, had not been overly optimistic. He had known, and been reminded repeatedly, that no one would come for him and he would never go home. There was to be no escape from Madara’s clutches and that dampened any impatience and hope that Obito could possibly have had.

 

When his other choices had been death or madness Obito had gratefully chosen monotony.

 

This, of course, was entirely different. With Lee, while entering one dimension or another was always rather hard on Obito, they were still basically a hop, skip, and a jump away from being right back in Konoha. More than that, there were still so many dangling mysteries that Obito’s own exhaustion hadn’t let him ponder too closely, but that needed to be answered stat lest Obito and his master find themselves in hot water.

 

Where were the hunter nin? Had they accepted that Lee and Obito weren’t Shire Baggins and now were hunting him again? Who was their host and likely the kage of this strange village? What did he believe in, what didn’t he believe in? Why was he being so courteous to foreign shinobi and was it solely because of Lee’s own intimidating power levels or was there something else going on? For that matter, what of the other hidden villages in this country? What of that bastard Shire Baggins himself?!

 

For god’s sake, they didn’t even know the name of their host, his country, or even the continent! He and Lee were so hopelessly out of touch with this place that it wasn’t even funny, and the longer that Obito sat uselessly in bed, the more likely they were to cause some massive diplomatic incident.

 

With that, Obito experimentally moved forward on his crutches, not quite with his usual hard-earned shinobi’s grace, but with enough coordination and energy to not be completely hopeless. Granted if someone decided to attack them out of the blue he’d have to rely on Lee to handle it, but he’d been pretty much doing that with their hunter nin friends anyways. Obito then with a determined grin, ready to face the world or have Lee-shishou beat it up for him, he toddled his way through the doorway and Lee’s golden wards.

 

And immediately stepping through them he could feel a sharp buzz of power, of blades of chakra poised over his head, ready to fall at the slightest provocation with undoubtedly leathal force. Obito turned and glanced at Lee, she shrugged even as she stood to follow him out the door, still looking entirely too disheveled from her run across the continent, “I told you, he kept dismantling the others.”

 

Obito had nothing to say to that, only the vague idea that either Lee had gone entirely overboard, or the man really had made enough of a nuisance of himself to push Lee into going overboard. At this point, it was hard to tell if it was one, the other, or a little from column a and a little from column b.

 

Instead of focusing on that, Obito decided to glance at his new surroundings, the world outside of his odd room. The hallway itself was narrow, fit only for two maybe three people to walk side by side, made of that same dark jagged stone of Obito’s room, and lit by rows of dim glass lanterns glowing with small flames. The place, despite its gothic architecture, had an almost clinical and sterile feel to it, more so than even Konoha’s hospital. There was no artwork, no clan symbols, no hint of culture or history of the hidden village, only the strange dark stone, the high arched ceilings, and a cold functionality to this place that drove off humanity.

 

Walking down the hallway, his crutches echoing against the stone floor, he noticed that there were relatively few rooms, and aside from the one he had been given most appeared to be closets or armories filled with axes, swords, daggers, and other metal weapons. In fact as he slowly but surely toddled his way down spiral staircases, Lee in front and ready to catch him if he fell forward, he began to realize that the bedroom as well as the throne room they’d been originally brought to were extreme anomalies in the tower.

 

The large throne hall, with its iron intimidating chair sitting towards the end where a kage or king might rest, had also had that functional hint to it, as well as having the look as if it was designed to be intimidating to a specific audience. It seemed more a place that had been built into this tower not because it was wanted, but because it had been deemed necessary for some sort of show, to live up to expectations. Obito remembered there being tapestries, great dark things depicting terrible battles, lining the walls, and a rich purple carpet. And although no one had been sitting in the throne at the time, there had been a thought that it clearly represented someone sitting inside it, the man who Lee had fashioned a body for.

 

The room Obito had been woken up in was different than even this, it was far sparser (certainly lacking tapestries or any hint of artwork), but there had been a hint of culture and some life in the place with its carved wooden furniture and the stack of books on a shelf, making Obito wonder if it hadn’t been something more private, likely not a guest room but maybe the nameless kage’s own private rooms.

 

The place was also eerily empty, neither the hunter nin or any of the strange almost oni-like beings in sight, only Lee and Obito accompanied by that incessant chant pointed outward towards the west, “ _Ash nazg durbaltulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul…_ ”

“Does he ever shut up?” Obito couldn’t help but ask, and again, Lee, who appeared far too tired to give a shit about any of this just shrugged as if what their new kage friend did in his free time was hardly their problem.

 

Which, Obito supposed it wasn’t. If he wanted to spend all day and all night shouting on rooftops as a giant fiery eyeball Obito was hardly going to stop him. Normally, like Lee, he wouldn’t care in the slightest, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t met shinobi with stranger hobbies than that (well, the turning into a giant eyeball of fire would have been a touch concerning but that was for entirely different reasons.)

Still, it was really starting to get on Obito’s nerves, something about the guttural sound of that language, his words, put him on edge in a way that a language alone really shouldn’t. Like the very sound of them was equivalent to fingernails against a blackboard.

 

He just grimaced and continued his slow, painful, descent through this tower which was entirely too tall. It was like it was purposefully designed so that whatever unfortunate bastard did make it to the top floors died of heat stroke or at the very least was too exhausted to think. By the time Lee and Obito finally reached the bottom level Obito himself was breathing heavily and covered in sweat, gasping in the hot, heavy, air of the outside and wishing in vain for some sort of breeze.

 

And it was just as lifeless as it appeared from the window, a barren desolate wasteland of black earth, jagged rocks, and then the cradle of dark opposing mountains and the singular volcano even now spewing smoke and flame as if on the verge of erupting at any moment. Below them, below the main largest and tallest tower, carved into this foothill of the mountains were jagged smaller medieval towers of the same architecture and design, connected out to the plains by a single narrow bridge over a dark crevasse and river of lava. In the distance, Obito could hear inhuman cries echoing off the mountains and back into this desolate valley.

 

“I’m guessing that at this world’s version of the kage summit,” Lee mused as she looked out at their surroundings, “Our friend drew the short straw when it came to picking a location for his hidden village.”

 

Obito laughed but she more than had a point, despite the undoubted fertility of the land with the volcano so close by, there was no life here. More, with the mountain looking like that, the constant promise of terrible death. True, any invasion would find itself laying siege in an already barren wasteland and would quickly starve themselves, and more would have to pass through the unforgiving mountains to even find their way into this place. Still, staring out at the place, Obito couldn’t help the uncharitable thought that there was nothing here worth invading for.

 

No lumber, no rivers, just fire and the omnipresent threat of gruesome death that even the vast deserts of Wind Country didn’t provide.

 

He was about to say as much when the chanting finally stopped, there was a familiar almost blinding white light, and then a rush of air and heat as in all his beautiful glory their friend the kage made a diplomatic, politely smiling, appearance, “ _Man dû, nin mellyn._ ”

 

Then, glancing at Obito and his crutches for a moment, he added in an equally polite tone, no perhaps a tone that was supposed to be softer and more relieved than that as if his own words were filled with his own generosity and kindness, “ _Im no gelir cin aer ú-flae._ ”

 

Obito and Lee couldn’t help but stare in tandem, he was just so… charming. Unbelievably pretty, perhaps even more so in the dim lighting that constituted daylight in this wasteland versus the darker light of Obito’s makeshift hospital room, but more than that he was unnervingly polite. Just cheerfully smiling as if he really was just bidding them good morning or good day after they’d casually strolled out of his tower, not stopped by anyone or anything, after they’d been brought in only a few days before as prisoners by his merciless (and hopelessly confused) hunter nin.

 

The man was… Well, not like Senju Hashirama, not at all, but like a toned-down version of his own puppy like enthusasim and good will towards all men even bastards like Uchiha Madara.

 

Except that, and Obito didn’t know why because there was nothing to hint at this, not even the man’s chakra, but he had the feeling like the man was desperately faking it until he made it. If only because no one, not even Senju Hashirama, could possibly not find a foreign Lee unnerving and terrifying.

 

Especially after she’d called upon the might of heaven to create a body for him out of nothing after having supposedly been taken prisoner by a squad of truly persistent hunter nin that would even put the five great villages to shame.

 

“ _Man erin,_ ” Lee repeated a bit dully, that blank look on her face that said she had no idea what to say to any of this. At that he glanced up at the sky, towards the very visible sun that was now slowly slinking west to make one spectacular sunset with the ash in the air.

 

“ _Man dû,_ ” he corrected, clearly the second word having to do something with the time of day or else standing outside versus inside, and yet Obito couldn’t quite bring himself to care. He just kept staring, waiting for the other shoe to fall, waiting for something to happen from this man who appeared to be king of a wasteland.

 

But there was nothing, just polite, charming, smiles, the foul scent of blood and fumes in the air, a river of lava gurgling beneath them, and inhuman cries echoing across the mountains.

 

Now, after having lived in a cave for about six months with Madara while tied to a rock Obito liked to think he’d learned some patience. However, also because of this life changing experience, he would admit that sometimes his patience easily went down the drain and that when things got a little too weird or a little too alarming he’d force them into action.

 

Such as pointing at their host and asking, point blank, in a language he undoubtedly could not understand, “What is wrong with you?!”

 

He blinked, eyes so bright and so dark and so very blue, and asked, “ _Man?_ ”

 

By which he likely was asking his own baffled, “What?” but Obito couldn’t bring himself to care as he motioned around them, to Lee and Obito, and then to the man himself, long since past his own limit, “You’re some kind of a kage of this… This wasteland, which Lee and I all but are taken prisoner with the intention of toppling your village if things had gone south and you inevitably tried to torture us, and you’re all polite smiles and giving us the only goddamn bedroom in your entire goddamn tower along with fresh fruit that you must be importing at truly ridiculous costs… What kind of a kage are you?!”

 

“Obito,” Lee chastised, green eyes tired and narrowed and apparently not ready to listen to Obito rant to this bastard but goddammit Obito was too weirded out not to rant to this bastard.

 

The man, if anything, looked slightly more baffled and now slightly annoyed. As if he too knew exactly how polite he was being and was now upset and insulted that Obito dared to find his unfounded and alarming generosity and kindness unnerving.

 

“Shishou,” Obito said, rounding on his master with a rather irritated glare of his own, “Even you have to admit this is bizarre! If he was trying to seduce us or poison us, then he could have at least had the decency to get to the point quickly instead of this… Weird lingering politeness!”

 

Lee, at least, had the decency to not lie and say she disagreed with Obito’s assessment. Her own rather awkward silence causing the man to grit his teeth and glare ever so slightly at her, as if realizing that this meant that whatever rant Obito had given, she silently agreed with.

 

Then, with her own too cheerful smile, Lee grinned over at their new friend, “Well, with that, I think we should get a tour.”

 

She then pantomimed him guiding, motioning towards the tower, the mountain, walking along, and Lee and Obito oohing and awing in appreciation behind him. Clearly, Lee’s ridiculous display did not translate well as the man’s dark eyebrows rose and his polite appreciation of their presence transitioned into polite questioning of their sanity.

 

Which, at least, was a somewhat reasonable reaction to Lee being Lee.

 

Still, he seemed to get the idea as he motioned first around them, to the entire area, his barren wasteland of a village, and said, “ _Barad-dûr nedh Mordor._ ”

 

He then slowly but surely, with Lee and Obito following along (or in Obito’s case hobbling) began to guide them down the smaller towers and walkways towards that thin bridge below. As they did, him naming the various towers, the word for tower themselves, and more, Obito muttered under his breath to Lee, “He wants something, I know it. Why this ridiculous politeness otherwise? No, he wants something, and he thinks that me, probably you, can get it for him. And the second we do, that very second, he will eagerly shank us.”

 

“You really have no faith,” Lee responded back to him, ignoring the man in question’s glance backwards with a polite smile of her own, pretending to fawn over his latest tower which looked the same as all the rest, this barad, mindon, or minnas as he appeared to call it interchangeably (although why there would be so many words for tower, or fortress with towers, was a bit hard to tell).

 

Along with appearing to dislike uncertain situations the man, apparently, disliked being ignored.

 

“Shishou,” Obito responded as soon as the man turned back again, a slight stiffness to his shoulders as he continued to guide them down towards the exit to the village, “Don’t tell me that you think he got to be a kage out of the goodness of his heart.”

 

Well, Senju Hashirama had, and arguably Senju Tobirama depending on who you talked to, but those were very strange cases, and both had proved their ruthlessness when the situation required it. They had both been respected, and feared, for very pointed reasons.

 

“Is he a kage?” Lee asked, she then looked at the tower before glancing outwards past this isolated fortress and into the wilderness, “I see his hidden village, but where are his shinobi?”

 

And that was a very alarming but very good point, thus far on their tour, ducking into towers and then back out of them again, people had been an entirely absent commodity, civilian or otherwise.

 

Of course, and this could be Obito, but there was the slightest edge to the man’s chakra, and even Lee’s, so that he doubted anyone would be stupid enough to confront them. Perhaps he wanted to merely coax them into believing the village was empty, all while Lee and Obito were being trailed and watched by ANBU…

 

They continued, through miles and miles of black stone, Obito drenched in sweat with the heat and his own exhaustion yet still stumbling forward on this truly bizarre tour of the many armories (“ _Magol thamb_ ” according to their guide) and the many watch towers. The man, like Lee, didn’t even have the decency to look human, he didn’t sweat or breathe but rather seemed to glide his way down the tower steps as if he was walking through the park, his skin even glowing ever so slightly in the constant dimness of this place.

 

There was something so very unfair about that, Obito couldn’t help but think, even Lee at least (due to her taxing journey getting them to this forsaken tower) at least had the decency to be covered in dirt and look like she was close to falling over from exhaustion.

 

Finally, they were out of the building and standing before the great bridge and the molten river beneath it. And there, finally, they ran across another being.

 

There were two misshapen men with gray skin and oversized yellow eyes, bulky and stocky and appearing just as demon like as Obito had remembered them. Only, instead of guarding over the bridge like Obito imagined they were supposed to have been doing, one was stabbing the other through his metal and leather armor with a pike, laughing maniacally as he tore through his brother’s flesh, salivating at the sight of his dark blood as if he was right then and there going to resort to cannibalism.

 

Now, Obito had seen many disturbing things in his short lifetime. He had been to war as a child, had witnessed death, had all but died himself, and then been brought back into a world of nightmares of Uchiha Madara’s own creating. This, however, this had to rank on the top of his own list.

 

As one, Lee and Obito turned to their guide.

 

The man said nothing for too long a moment, face perfectly blank, posture unreadable, then with a bright flash of light and chakra, and a spoken single word like a bell ringing, both demon men were gone, piles of ash and charcoal remaining where they had once stood.

 

“ _Orchoth_ ,” the man explained, as if this one word should tell them all they needed to know, and at seeing Lee and Obito continue to stare he seemed to internalize just how foreign they must be. Then, slower, his face still entirely unreadable he explained further.

 

“ _An io, hain lín celbin,_ ” this, apparently, was supposed to blow Obito and Lee’s collective minds. Obito turned towards Lee in askance but she looked about as confused and horrified as Obito himself did. Then, then slowly, she seemed to piece at least the gist of the words together.

 

“That word, he’s said that before, _celbin_ …” her eyes lit up as she came to some realization, “Oh, oh, wait a minute, he asked me something about that and _elvellyn_ when I was dragging your unconscious ass up to that room and we were cycling through languages. And he was very accusatory about it, well, sort of, for him, so it was more of Minato’s passive aggressive politeness whenever he gets upset. I think, I think these _celbin_ might be ninja from the other hidden villages, like Shire Baggins.”

 

At that name the man perked up, clearly startled and incredibly interested even as Obito tried to parse through Lee’s words and what the man might have meant by that, “Wait, are you saying… Is he… blaming his own incompetent cannibal foot soldiers on enemy ninja?”

 

Because there was your usual hidden village propaganda and then there was hidden village propaganda of the truly ridiculous variety. And blaming the cannibalism of your own foot soldiers on the enemy was edging into the absurd English territory of propaganda.

 

“Well, that’s probably what he wants us to believe but…” Lee then slapped a hand to her forehead. As if only now she was realizing something she should have figured out ages ago and would have if she wasn’t so damned tired, “Oh, Obito, I think you’re right, I think he does want something! Something he can’t get from anywhere else besides us.”

 

“Oh good, glad you’ve decided to be reasonable, Shishou,” Obito responded rather drily.

 

Lee motioned around with a truly wild grin, “Look at this dump! Obviously, if his village, _Barad-dûr_ , is to survive then he needs either a shinobi population whose quality is on par with at least Suna’s (which it’s clearly not given that his own people seem to eat each other and can’t even guard a bridge) or else he must invade and conquer these other villages with no standing army. Obito, if anyone needs an overpowered mercenary or two, or at least a sudden influx of natural resources, it’s this poor bastard.”

 

Obito and the bastard in question spared a look towards one another, and it was a strange, surreal, moment that Obito and him appeared to be sharing the same wordless thoughts even though they had no actual words in common.

 

Finally, it was Obito who said, “Shishou, he can’t possibly be that stupid or desperate.”

 

But it was clear that Lee thought he was, more, his barren homeland, his fits of insanity where he chanted songs out on the rooftops, his cannibalistic clansmen, all of it showed that this was a man who had entered some truly desperate straits and might very well be thinking that Obito and Lee’s sudden appearance in his lands was nothing less than a divine miracle.

 

So, with slightly more alarm, Obito noted, “Shishou, we’re not going to war on his behalf, that’s very far outside of our jurisdiction.”

 

Lee dismissed this, “Of course not, but Obito, what talent do you and I have in abundance?”

 

Obito glanced towards the land, and it was said that it only took him a second to realize what she was getting at, “Oh goddammit, mokuton.”

 

Lee grabbed his hands in hers, her grin growing ever wider, giving her a vigor and brightness despite her own tired features, “You and I learn his language, see what exactly it is he has to offer, we trade lumber, rivers, terraforming, and perhaps even recruiting for his goods and services.”

 

She then turned to their new friend, took his hand in hers (an action which seemed to alarm him to an absurd degree), as she grinned at him, “You, Obito, and I, comrade, shall become great friends by the end of this.”

 

Then, motioning to herself, to Obito, then to him she said with that same overpowering, so very Lee smile of hers, “ _Nin, Eru Lee, Uchiha Obito, a cin, mín eneth mellyn._ ”

 

The man didn’t smile, didn’t blink, stood perfectly still with entirely too wide of eyes and an expression that said nothing at all. However, of all of Lee’s schemes, of all the things he’d ever heard from her and about her, this perhaps had to be the most reasonable of all of them.

 

And perhaps because of that, even at this moment, standing in this hell pit this man had the indecency to call a village, Obito knew it would all go terribly wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things Sauron wants: The ring and world conquest, things Sauron doesn't want: Trees. Next chapter, expect less of a language barrier, a slight but necessary time skip, and the beginnings of Lee and Obito trying to break down exactly what it is this strange foreign kage wants from them. 
> 
> Also, given all the gratuitous Sindairn scattered throughout, with the warning that I've been using online dictionaries and translators (so it's likely to not be the best damn elvish you've ever seen) here's what I've got as far as translations of what the bananas Sauron has been saying this chapter.
> 
> 1) "Man dû, nin mellyn." - Good evening, my friends.
> 
> 2) "Im no gelir cin aer ú-flae." - I am glad you are not ill
> 
> 3) "Man erin." - Good morning.
> 
> 4) "Man?" - What?
> 
> 5) "Barad-dûr nedh Mordor _._ " - Barad-dur in Mordor
> 
> 6) "Orchoth" - Orcs, as in the race of Orcs.
> 
> 7) "Magol Thamb" - Hall of Sword, which I decided to make for myself to mean "armory" as the Sindairn dictionary does not have a word for armory. Those damn foreign shinobi elves being pacifists before Morgoth and or the Noldor, how dare they?!
> 
> 8) "An io, hain lín celbin" - Long ago, they were elves. Although note that past tense was... Not a thing when I looked it up so it's more, "Long ago, they are elves" but it's as close as I can do/am willing to do for fanfiction. 
> 
> This is not actually a lie, orcs were once elves twisted and tortured by Morgoth into their current lowly state of being, but to uninformed foreigners like Lee and Obito, if they could piece together what Sauron just told them, could pave the way to Sauron's usual means of propaganda to the human race which is essentially "replace the word Morgoth with elf". By blaming the depraved existence of orcs on the elves in a roundabout way like this, he plants future seeds for distrust between our shinobi friends and the elves (and thus gets them more solidly in Sauron's camp). Of course, Obito and Lee being paranoid shinobi who can barely even conceive the idea of a foreign king telling them the truth or treating them so graciously (despite this being no doubt what Sauron assumes they assume, because this is usually the norm when it comes to elf kingdoms and even kingdoms of men for the most part), assume this is blatant ridiculous propaganda (which it kind of is but kind of isn't), and that clearly Sauron's trying to get them on their side in the most ridiculous and insulting manner ever because by the state of his kingdom and deformed cannibal foot soldiers, he's in dire straits. Which, perhaps would be true if Sauron only relied upon orcs, if he gave any sort of damn for the state of his kingdom and people, and if he didn't still have the ring floating somewhere out there which would give him the ability to crush armies like a boss.
> 
> Obviously, this comes up in a clearer, more blatant, manner later and will certainly be expanded upon. Expanded upon more next chapter, even, as the language barrier becomes slightly less of a barrier (so expect slightly less gratuitous elvish) but that cultural barrier remains ever strong.
> 
> 10) "Nin, Eru Lee, Uchiha Obito, a cin, mín eneth mellyn." - "Me, Eru Lee, Uchiha Obito, and you, we will be friends." or more accurately "Me, Eru Lee, Uchiha Obito, and you, we are friends" but again a lack of future tense when I dug around for it. 
> 
> Also a note on Sauron having not yet revealed his name, this will be expanded upon next chapter, but ultimately it boils down to elves being more tied to their names and his current name, right now, translating to "the abhorred one", which doesn't do much good for cultivating one's generous and benevolent image with foreign beings currently far more powerful than yourself. 
> 
> But oh, Sauron, all of your politicking will get you... trees. So many trees.


	6. Chapter 6

_Part Six: The language barrier begins to truly crumble though the cultural barrier stands tall and proud, Sauron reveals his name in an oddly anticlimactic moment, Lee and Obito drop rather alarming details about their own origin and village, Sauron seizes opportunities that he’ll undoubtedly come to regret._

* * *

 

 

As it turned out, there was one more room in the dark kage tower of Barad-Dûr which was not a broom closet or else an armory. A small study, similar to that small bedroom in which Lee and Obito still stayed, whose walls were lined with wooden bookcases, artfully carved, and crowed with leather-bound book upon leather-bound book all with faintly yellowing. Just in front of a fireplace, a wooden desk sat, covered in papers of foreign calligraphy, sketches that seemed more like blueprints of swords, armor, and rings, and what looked like they could be mathematical equations or else theoretical notes on fuinjutsu.

 

And every night since their impromptu tour of Barad-Dûr, as Obito limped his way to recovery and finally made it off crutches, and Lee began to sleep and shower and act like a normal human being again, the man would appear outside of Lee’s doors and ask, oh so politely, for a game of his own people’s version of shogi.

 

And he was patient and polite as he, in slow words, hand gestures, and even drawings (his handwriting so precise, not necessarily beautiful or artful, but clear and concise and serving a function of legibility rather than anything aesthetic). And as Lee, at a frightening pace, picked up the language he called Sindairn (and Obito’s limped behind her in understanding as he had limped behind her on crutches), the rules were hashed out, the games were played, and the conversations began to slowly stumble along.

 

And Obito, frankly, had no idea what to make of the man.

 

Obito left the games and the conversation mostly to Lee, who though she currently lacked any real fluency yet (though it was coming alarmingly quickly), was already morphing Sindairn into her own hideous dialect of pop-culture references and out of place slang that had the man attempting not to grimace or wince at every other word out of her mouth.  

 

Instead, Obito chose to watch, taking note of small subtle aspects of this man and refining and polishing them in his mind until a clearer picture could be seen. Something more than the everlasting patience, that unflappable kindness and generosity, and the subtle benign curiosity he contented himself to display towards them.

 

The man, despite his lack of any sane human shinobi and a reliance instead solely upon cannibalistic oni who had clearly bargained with the wrong summons or interbred themselves with the wrong blood limit, did hold himself as a kage and appeared at least to act as one. He walked in his tower not merely as if he owned it but as if he had built it himself, knew every corner and every shadow, and could without question walk into any room and expect it to be already empty.

 

And he held himself as a kage would, spoke with the authority that Minato-sensei had learned and used now after having stood beneath the weight of the kage’s hat, and even though Obito could barely understand the man (and too often found himself distracted by just how damn pretty the man was) there was an eloquence and authority to his every word so that he made speaking itself and artform.

 

There was a subtle meticulousness and efficiency about him, in his handwriting, his sketches and charts, in his tower and the way he spoke of it, that wasn’t quite obnoxious but was very clearly central to his personality far beneath this generosity he was so eager to show them.

 

He was, in many senses, the antithesis of Eru Lee.

 

Even looking at them together, sitting across the game board, Lee fair and bright and comprised of shocking colors, wrinkled clothing, hair bound yet still barely contained, and the kage dark and beautiful, clothes elegant and expensive, everything about him tranquil and flowing, they truly looked as if they belonged to two entirely different worlds.

 

Not simply because the man’s features were foreign, his eyes a kind of blue that didn’t exist in eyes, and his ears pointed like leaves.

 

You’d expect someone like that, someone so different, to have become exasperated at Lee if not terrified long before now. Senju Tobirama, who this man vaguely reminded Obito of if he thought about it, made no pretense of his fond exasperation for Eru Lee and all of her shenanigans.

 

But no, every night he spoke with them, every night he would smile fondly and explain this or that, every night he would contain whatever irritation he felt at Lee calling him this or that in Sindairn and simply explain that those words did not work like that and please, Lee, my friend, try the master the language before you improve upon it.

 

Nothing ever ruffled the man, threw him off balance, nothing except that moment of Lee forcing this beautiful body back upon him and he’d stared up at her with horror and wonder written plainly on his face. And that, more than anything else, had Obito worried.

 

That, and, even after all this time and the language barrier finally beginning to be breached, he had yet to give them a name.

 

Lee, if she was worried or not, had taken to telling their new, still nameless friend the ridiculous story of how they’d ended up on his doorstep. Except, naturally, she’d gotten stuck on explaining sexy midget to the man, “ _And so I said to Obito, that our friend the beautiful, powerful, and oddly alluring dwarf, sitting in the corner with all of his dwarf non-soldier friends and pretending he wasn’t looking anywhere towards us while drinking beer that was as large as his face, clearly had some sort of desire for sweet soldier flesh and a serious problem keeping it inside of his pants._ ”

 

Now, how Lee had picked up enough Sindairn, in a few short weeks, to produce that quickly said mound of garbage at a speed that Obito could barely follow and only really put together because he was there at the time (and knew exactly how Lee would spin the story in English or in his own native tongue) was entirely beyond him. And also vastly unfair, because all Obito could really do at the man’s bewildered expression was offer a sheepish grin and note lamely in slow and undoubtedly ridiculously accented Sindairn, “ _He was very short._ ”

 

Naturally, that did not appear to clarify anything at all to the man, and he looked as if he was beginning to regret asking.

 

“ _Wait, you met… a sexually alluring dwarf?_ ” the man asked first eyebrows rising as if he could contain them anymore, “ _In a drinking hall in some nameless squalid village of men… Was he a dwarf or was he merely short?_ ”

 

Lee blinked at him, brow furrowing, “ _He was extraordinarily short._ ”

 

The man, apparently, had already learned that Lee was sometimes not to be relied upon for answers and turned towards Obito in askance, Obito merely shrugged and wide eyed confirmed and repeated himself, “ _He was very short._ ”

 

Tonight, finally, it seemed that this with this absurd and ridiculous tale the man had hit his limit.

 

He gave in to temptation and momentarily forgot the game and his turn to rub at his temples, wincing slightly, and clarifying, “ _No, no, dwarves are a… a race, a people, unto themselves. Was he merely a very short man or a dwarf?_ ”

 

Lee and Obito glanced at each other, both clearly at a loss on how even to start answering that question, until Lee finally looked back and noted, “ _We didn’t think to ask._ ”

 

At that the man’s rubbing of his temples became that much more forceful, as if only that repetitive motion was keeping his head from banging on the desk, and Obito and Lee were clearly being willfully stupid, “ _You would know._ ”

 

“ _How the hell would we know?_ ” Obito asked, not sure if the word he’d used for hell was the correct one though, their host was a bit to polite to curse at them and the few cannibal soldiers they ran into either didn’t curse or spoke some guttural terrifying language that made every other sentence sound like a promise to ravage your mother and eat her defiled corpse.

 

Obito had ended up substituting in Mordor for it, and apparently, his guess had been correct though unamusing as the man had only given Obito a look when Obito had first said it as if he knew Obito thought he was being very clever.

 

“ _They do not look like men or act like them,_ ” the man said with a sigh, a small one, but a sigh none the less.

 

“ _Oh, he was very humanoid_ ,” Lee clarified, as he had been, just oddly short, and with really really hairy bare feet.

 

At first the man balked at this explanation slightly, expression turning into one entirely disbelieving as if he could not believe that Lee had just said that out loud and to his face, and then said, “ _Dwarves are humanoid._ ”

 

“ _You just said they look different,_ ” Lee pointed out in annoyance which in turn seemed to annoy their own host further.

 

“ _They do look different,_ ” the man hissed, he then motioned to himself, to his own beautiful glory and asked point blank, “ _Look at me, do I look like a man to you?_ ”

 

Obito and Lee stared at him, Obito’s jaw opening slightly as he tried to think of a way to answer that question or if he even wanted to know what the real answer was if it wasn’t “a man”. Obito, though he was pretty sure he was using the word of “men” as in race of humanity versus gender, wasn’t sure how he would react if the answer turned out to be “a woman”.

 

“ _Is that a trick question?_ ” Lee finally asked with extreme hesitation, but apparently it hadn’t been at all, and the man (who apparently was not a man) had the gall to look offended.

 

The man smiled very thinly, the kind of smile Minato-sensei would give right before he was about to start killing everyone and said in an easy and cheerful tone at odds with his rising killing intent, “ _No, for future reference, I am a maia._ ”

 

Now, what exactly made a maia different from a man was entirely beyond Obito or Lee, so they just sort of smiled slightly and Lee, being Lee decided to get back into her story. As she did so, the kage decided to move on, and studying the board for only a moment moved a piece forward while Lee chattered.

 

“ _Right, well, at any rate, our sexually appealing perhaps a dwarf friend with grossly hairy bare feet is gushing out_ chakra _a mile a minute. Meanwhile, Obito and I are just sitting there, minding our own business and drinking rancid non-soldier beer in the sticks while sexy perhaps-dwarf does his best to construct an overwhelming illusion to convince us to grab him, an empty bed, and allow him to pound us into a flea-bitten bed…_ ”

 

And it only took that small (and almost unintelligible) monologue for the man to interrupt with that still strained smile, “ _As fascinating, and strange, as this story is… Know that I mean no offense, truly, and I know that you are foreign to these lands, but you have a tongue of lead._ ”

 

Lee blinked, somewhat taken aback, and appeared to decide that she would take that as a compliment, “ _Thank you, my friend._ ”

 

“ _Lead is a worthless metal that poisons water,_ ” the man cheerfully clarified, with a small added laugh as if he just found Lee’s antics so very adorable, “ _I’m afraid that the great elven poets of the latter ages would weep at the sound of every other word out of your mouth._ ”

 

And here, Obito thought, he himself would cut in with his own rudimentary basic, “ _I thought you hated elves._ ”

 

It was as if he had forgotten Obito was even there, a common occurrence when Lee was in a room being Lee, and he turned his head and blinked slightly as he took in the sight of him. Obito held his gaze, and wondered if the man was bold, stupid, or ignorant to meet the sharingan head on like that. He also wondered what he saw when he looked at Obito, unlike many civilians and even shinobi, nothing familiar was showing on his face.

 

“ _They are ancient enemies of mine,_ ” and that was all he said, not that he hated them, not that he was currently fighting them, not that they were from an enemy kingdom or village, but simply that they were enemies and leaving Obito to fill in whatever blanks he wished.

 

Obito could not help but shoot back his own chiding, slightly amused look, as if he found what the man had said was cute and that he undoubtedly thought it was very clever but not so much to get past Obito.

 

Lee finally took her turn, and with a harder look in his blue eyes, the man swiftly moved a piece that ended the game.

 

Lee looked down at the board, leaning back and tracing the pattern it made with her eyes, then exclaimed in Obito’s native language, “Well, shit.”

 

She then looked back at the oddly smug man across from her, as if indulging in this win of his was sweet delicious nectar he had denied himself far too long, and pointed out, “ _It took you this long to stop letting me win all the time?_ ”

 

The smile disappeared, “ _I have not…_ ”

 

Lee dismissed this with a pale hand and an entirely unconvinced expression, “ _Please, my friend, I rarely even win at_ shogi _and I’ve been playing that since childhood._ ”

 

The idea that Lee had caught on to him so quickly, or that Obito had, did not seem to be a pleasant one for the man as he at first, for a second, glowered, and then faded back into a more neutral and friendly expression with alarming ease.

 

 

He was always so good at putting on masks, this strange host of theirs.

 

“ _Right, well, it’s been fun, my friend,_ ” Lee said, moving to stand but then paused, looked across from him, an odd piercing expression on her face as he took him in, “ _You know, you’ve kept putting off telling us your name for so long that I didn’t even pause to say it._ ”

 

The man paused in turn, giving Lee a rather assessing look then throwing it to Obito as well, finally he said, “ _Remember that I am not a man, mortal rules do not apply to me._ ”

 

Obito resisted the urge to glance at Lee while Lee clearly resisted the urge to glance at him. Because while those words had been thrown around enough for Obito to parse their meaning, he wanted to think that the man hadn’t just casually declared, like the world’s largest diva, that rules of mortality didn’t apply to him. Implying, of course, that he made his own rules, bitch!

 

Except, given everything that had happened thus far, somehow Obito really doubted that was what the man was getting at.

 

On seeing their blank expressions, he must have realized again just how little they understood, “ _How much do you know of the elves or maiar?_ ”

 

Lee and Obito, for a moment, said nothing, and then Lee slowly said, “ _Consider tapestries entirely empty._ ”

 

For a moment though, the man seemed more puzzled by this, almost confused as he looked at the pair of them but particularly Lee, “ _Are you sure you do not simply have another term for us? Immortal beings, made of light itself, great shape changers and wielders of magic…_ ”

 

“ _Nope, mortality is quite chronic in_ Konohagakure,” Lee quipped, and for once the man didn’t look annoyed or unamused by her twisting his language this way and that, but instead just seemed more baffled as if Lee had given him an answer that he just couldn’t accept looking at the pair of them.

 

Seeing something in them, in Lee and perhaps even Obito, that made their lack of knowledge impossible.

 

Of course, Obito clued into some of his words, “ _Unless, with magic, you mean_ chakra.”

 

Because of course, Lee and Obito could wield chakra and Lee like none other. Oh, that would confuse the man, saying they had no idea about any of this after having seen, well, everything.

 

The man nodded slowly but with the feeling that this wasn’t quite what he meant, “ _Magic is… tangential to elves and the maiar. Regardless, we are different than the second born, mortal, beings who walk the earth. The obvious aspect, the ones which even the most ignorant of beings knows, is the immortality. We are ageless and eternal even in Middle Earth. However, there are other less obvious differences. One concerns our names._ ”

 

“ _Names?_ ” Lee questioned, leaning forward and looking at the man, watching him almost hesitate as he continued to explain.

 

“ _We are tied to many things, constricted far more tightly than our mortal counterparts, fate, loves, and even our names. Our names are tied to our fates, can shape them and shape us to suit them. We are our names or else become them. My current name, bestowed upon me thousands of years ago by my enemies, is not a kind one. And my original name, and all others I have taken since, have been lost to me. To give any of those now, I have no doubt the lie would be both obvious and insulting._ ”

 

He then looked across at them, a quirk of a smile on his lips, and said, “ _I am called Sauron_.”

 

Lee quietly noted to Obito, “I’m pretty sure that means ‘the abhorred one’ or at least ‘the detested one.”

 

Still, Lee breathed out and looked at him with raised eyebrows, pointing out, “ _And your enemies named you this and so you’re stuck with it?_ ”

 

The man nodded, now apparently relaxed that neither Obito nor Lee gave any shit what he chose to call himself, or what he’d been stuck with if his explanation was to be believed, “ _Essentially, yes._ ”

 

 _“Well,_ Christ _, you got off lucky, my friend,_ ” Lee noted, ignoring Sauron’s look of baffled annoyance and insult as she motioned to herself, “ _Do you have any idea what my enemies go around calling me? On a good day? Why I’d be stuck with Red Death, The God of Death, Devourer of Children, and undoubtedly a few other truly nasty ones that they don’t bother to publish in the bingo books._ ”

 

“ _Abhorred one, I mean, that’s basically just strongly disliked one, you’re essentially the friend that nobody likes… It’s almost cute,_ ” Lee said with a small smile that did indeed say she saw Sauron’s name, bestowed upon him by his enemies, to be positively adorable in comparison to the yellow flash, god of shinobi, or even something like Sasori of the red sand.

 

The man looked as if he was torn between being truly disturbed, insulted, or else entirely baffled.

 

While he was busy trying to decide how he felt Obito latched on to a previous point, “ _Wait, you said your name is tied to your fate? Or that you become it?_ ”

 

The man nodded slowly, allowing Obito to distract him from Lee at least for the moment, “ _Yes, though, it’s more likely that a name is bestowed upon someone that already suits them. For an action or deed they have already committed, but sometimes, a name itself can shape a path._ ”

 

“ _Then why on earth did they name you something like Sauron?_ ”

 

Something in the man’s expression hardened, his eyes darkened, and he looked at Obito as if he had expected this question though perhaps not quite so soon, “ _We were at war._ ”

 

Lee’s eyes lit in understanding, her expression brightening as she clued into what Obito was getting at, “Oh my god, it’s _Ghostbusters_.”

 

Sauron’s head, beautiful even when wary and confused and so very out of his element, swung towards the now grinning Lee.

 

Lee’s hands flew through gestures as she explained to the man in rapid Sindairn that Obito could, by some miracle, only barely follow, “ _If you have the potential, even the slightest potential, to become your name why would they go naming you something like Sauron? Why give you even the slightest weaponry to use against them, even something as mild as being abhorred? They could call you anything, something totally harmless that could never possibly pillage and sack their villages, like Snuggly McDuckface or Sunshine Rainbowpants. And if one of them, just one of them sticks…_ ”

 

Finally, after only a week with Lee and Obito as sane company or else the view from the top of his tower the man snapped, he stood, slammed his pale hands onto the desk top and shouted, “ _That is not how it works!_ ”

 

“ _How would you know? Have you ever tried it?_ ” Lee asked with raised eyebrows as if she knew very well that Sauron had far too much dignity to call any of his enemy kages Happy Daffodil or what have you.

 

Obito thought at this point he might storm out, return to his rooftop view and chanting, but instead he breathed out, smiled and sat back down as if all was right in the world, “ _I believe, Eru Lee, that I know quite a bit more on this topic than you possibly could._ ”

 

Lee was entirely unmoved and merely asked, “ _Are you sure?_ ”

 

He opened his mouth, then paused, as if Lee of all people saying that was enough to truly give him pause. And then he looked pensive, sober, and beneath this almost afraid. Then, quietly, to diver the topic he stated, “ _You have not said much on your homeland, Eru Lee and Obito Uchiha._ ”

 

Lee sighed, “ _I’m not sure I have the Sindairn for that particular topic._ ”

 

“ _You sailed from the west?_ ” and this wasn’t merely a question, but instead an almost bitter accusation, as if answering this would tell Sauron everything he had ever suspected and feared about them and would erect an unbreachable wall between them.

 

“ _No,_ ” Lee replied softly, almost kindly, as she reached out across the table to take his hand into one of hers while the other pointed towards the vaulted ceiling, “ _We sailed from the stars._ ”

 

He looked as if he could barely comprehend that idea, like he thought she had misspoken and surely meant something else, but he said nothing and looked at her as if despite all his doubts and all he knew about the world he would believe her.

 

If only for this moment.

 

Lee kept talking, squeezing his hand in hers as she explained further, “ _We came to see your villages, meet your soldiers who wield_ chakra _as we do, to see, learn, to trade, and forge bonds between our people._ ”

 

And at that, at that fire sparked in his eyes once again, that burning and unquestionable drive which propelled him forward, “ _You have come at a bad time, the age of the elves is ending, they are leaving Middle Earth and sailing west. Had you come thousands of years ago, perhaps, things might have been different. However, even if you approach the few elves who remain, you will not find yourselves welcome. Three thousand years ago I was at war with them and a great kingdom of men, however now that I have returned, old grudges will flare once more, and war will return. And all who are not known friends are spies or enemies._ ”

 

Lee gave him a rather dry look and noted, “ _Given that we have yet to talk to an elf I will reserve judgement._ ”

 

Sauron smiled, a beautiful thing that matched the rest of his beautiful face, as if Lee had just said an unwitting yet very clever joke, “ _They will not reserve judgement for you._ ”

 

Lee nodded at this but seemed to decide it was time to get to the point, “ _Sauron, for a kage on the brink of war, with an army of incompetent cannibals, you are unnaturally generous and trusting. What is it, exactly, that you want from us?_ ”

 

The man’s face was a teasing mask as he playfully asked, “ _Must I want something?_ ”

 

“ _Yes,_ ” Obito said bluntly, leaving no room for argument or wiggling on Sauron’s part.

 

Lee then decided to beat Sauron to whatever response it was he wanted to give, “ _Our king, the fourth shadow of fire, had given explicit orders that we remain neutral in situations thus as these, my friend. Even if we wanted to, we can’t be your mercenary force in this great war of yours. However, we can supply you with natural resources._ ”

 

He said nothing to this, instead watched as Lee moved to his side, motioning towards his silver blade, covered in unfamiliar seals. Motioning to it in askance, he nodded and allowed her to take it from her side, where she ran over the seals with chakra in one finger, watching them glow. She then drew out a kunai from the pouch on her waist and stabbed through it with the sword, watching as the throwing knife easily shattered.

 

“ _Did you make this?_ ” she asked as she handed it back to him, which, slowly he nodded as he took the blade from her.

 

“ _We don’t have anything like this,_ ” Lee noted, “ _This or the swords of your hunter_ nin, _the_ fuinjutsu _, even the steel are all things we don’t have. If you can forge swords for us, four or five specialized swords like this one and then regular more mass produced, Obito and I can get you lumber and even rivers._ ”

 

The man frowned, then smiled, politely, “ _Thank you, but I have no need of lumber or rivers, the swords I can forge as a gift, in gratitude for all you and your people have done for me in the short time we have known one another._ ”

 

“ _You have no need of lumber or rivers?_ ” Obito echoed with disbelief.

 

“ _No,_ ” Sauron said shortly, “ _Mordor, Barad-Dûr, they are perfectly fine the way they are._ ”

 

“ _You leave underneath a mountain that will collapse at any minute!_ ” Obito pointed out, not the right words, but close enough for all that Sauron didn’t appear to care.

 

“ _The volcano will not erupt,_ ” he scoffed, as if it wasn’t spewing ash and even lava every day, “ _The volcano will not erupt, my soldiers are not all orcs and those that are orcs are controlled as far as their cursed race allows them to be, and Mordor is as intended._ ”

 

“ _A hideous dystopic wasteland filled with cannibals beneath a mountain that will erupt at any moment?_ ” Lee asked looking as if even she couldn’t quite believe what she was saying.

 

“ _No,_ ” the man said, now not just insulted but visibly angered, chakra beginning to boil beneath his skin and causing it to burn like a star. He sneered across at them, an oddly unpleasant expression across his fair features, “ _Besides, even if you could ship me supplies from the stars themselves, even if you could forge rivers with your own hands or sing them into existence, I doubt you could do such things in time for the war. Or, more importantly, could deliver something that I could not simply procure myself._ ”

 

For a moment Lee and Obito said nothing, merely stared, watched as the man’s anger faded and a vaguely exhausted and regretful expression appeared on his face. Lee and Obito stood, bowed, offering him a pleasant night of chanting towards the west like a jackass, then walked out of the door into the hallway.

 

Standing there, they looked at one another, then in Obito’s native language Lee noted, “He’s clearly mildly insane. We’ll just do it anyways.”


	7. Chapter 7

_Part Seven: Lee and Obito enact their plan much to Sauron’s fury, Lee officially has enough and verbally bitch slaps the Lord of the Rings, and Lee and Obito are given a new, distasteful, but probably more manageable quest._

* * *

 

 

In the end, it was Lee that night who did the work, Obito still recovering from the chakra drain too much to create hundreds upon hundreds of trees. More, even with mokuton, he was not what Senju Hashirama was. For all the shodaime’s delight at Obito’s strange new abilities, like a grandson he’d never had, it was clear to everyone involved that Obito had a weak substitute of the skill, an echo of what was the natural mokuton in Senju Hashirama.  

 

Obito knew all too well that he couldn’t have built Konohagakure itself with his own two hands.

 

So, they walked out, past the great bridge as well as the two incompetent demon guardsmen who didn’t even blink as Lee’s genjutsu shrouded them, over the crevasse filled with a river of lava, and onto the great barren planes that stretched before them for miles, out into the distance where, into the mountains, a single great black gate was formed to separate the bleak and desolate village of Barad-dûr from the rest of the world.

 

And from above them, high on the tallest tower, a great fiery eye burned and stared out towards the west, his dread voice echoing across the mountains and back into the valley with those words whose meaning Obito couldn’t even begin to guess and Sauron had never once explained, “ _Ash nazg durbaltulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul_ …”

 

“Would he even know,” Obito asked, staring up at the tower, “If we left, shishou?”

 

Lee stopped, looked back at him, then at the tower itself and the eyeball looking far past his own kingdom and even the barely imprisoned shinobi he kept as guests there. She frowned, eyebrows drifting together to wrinkle her forehead in thought as she admitted, “I don’t know.”

 

Obito didn’t know if it was hubris, obsession, or something else that had him blazing up there like a second sun without any concern for the fact that Lee and Obito were, without his permission, changing the shape of his village. For the better, true, but Konoha…

 

Oh, Konoha would never have willingly allowed something like this to happen.

 

Lee turned back to the wasteland before them, slipping off her shoes so that her bare feet stood on the jagged, dark, ashen earth that comprised Mordor and for a moment simply stood with her eyes closed, breathing in the scent of death and decay on the wind.

 

And while Lee was thinking or else gathering senchakra, Obito glanced once more at the great black tower. More, through some instinct or curiosity, while they were down here far enough away that he didn’t have to crane his neck for a good view, and while the eye itself was looking anywhere but in his direction, his sharingan flickered on.

 

“Sauron,” Obito whispered as he took in the eye, a great ball of fiery chakra, burning outwards at a rate that it could not support yet could not stand to be anything less than it was, sending out pulses of chakra constantly towards the west with every syllable uttered and listening for the echoes, “The abhorred one…”

 

The sharingan burned out and Obito turned his attention once again to Lee who now was opening her eye, motioning out in front of her with pale hands as a conductor for an orchestra might, “Trees, trees surrounding it on all sides to the foothills of the mountains, and a river which flows down from the mountains and rings around the village in a great circle, a second watery gate…”

 

With those words, with whatever vision she had in her head, her fingers tightened for a moment, instinctively pulling upwards along with her chakra in the earth as, with a great cry, she summoned trees by thousands upon thousands to grow at unnatural rates as they strived upwards for sunlight in a land where there was none.

 

Suddenly, the eye looked down, pupil a single black slit and iris a bright molten color like metal which had only just come out of the fire. And more, there was a flash of impressive killing intent from the top of the tower, aimed down on Lee and Obito standing like ants beneath it.

 

“Shishou,” Obito said, an edge to his voice as the trees kept growing, as Lee, with shaking hands and fingers, skin burning so pale it almost seemed to glow like the ever-missing sun, pointed towards the mountains, drawing a great trench and icy river water to rush through it.

 

“Shishou,” Obito said, a little louder this time, “I think, maybe, that he wasn’t kidding about the tree thing.”

 

“What?” Lee asked, shaking and covered in sweat as a world so close to Konoha began to form around them, built through Lee’s will and chakra alone.

“When he said he didn’t want trees or rivers,” Obito reminded her, an edge now in his voice as yes, the eye was growing brighter and hotter with each passing second as it looked down on them with the judgement of an unforgiving god betrayed, “I don’t think he was kidding.”

 

“What are you talking about?” Lee said, slumping forward as the river and trees began to form without her, winding their way around Barad-dûr and encircling it from all sides, “Of course he wants trees.”

 

“I really think he…” Obito trailed off, as with a great burst of fire and light, the eye began to move towards the pair of them, “Well, shit, I think he’s going to tell us himself.”

 

“What?” Lee asked, turning towards her as she wiped sweat off her forehead, but by the time she said the word he was already there, the bright storm of fire flickering as it, after a moment too long, finally took the form of the humanoid form they were oh so familiar with.

 

Except, his expression was one not familiar at all, not that placid easy generosity, not the slight annoyance and exasperation, the utter disbelief, or even the wonder and fear of that first moment as he’d looked up at Lee as if she were a god. No, no here was the rage that had been missing, the killing intent that made his blue eyes burn white and his skin glow even brighter than that, reaching beyond the limits of his own chakra as if through his anger alone he could match the likes of Eru Lee.

 

And Lee, thoughtlessly, with her own look of discontented annoyance at his killing intent said with a wry smile in Sindarin, “ _You’re welcome, Sauron._ ”

 

A day before the man would have smiled, politely and flatly, the kind of smile Minato-sensei might give when he wanted to do anything but. He would have laughed and perhaps told Lee that she lacked in wit the same poetry she lacked in language. However, in this moment at least, all the masks were finally gone and along with it any witty or pretty phrase he might say to distract them.

 

Finally, Obito thought, he showed them some glimpse of what he truly was.

 

Instead he turned to look past them, towards the great forest that Lee had created out of nothing, and with a great and terrible cry, yet one still oddly beautiful, his chakra rose within him at each syllable, “ _And I shall be a second sun upon the earth, scorching and burning all living things that dare to grow and stand upon this barren ground!_ ”

 

Fire rose out from the air around him, circling outwards in a great arc, reaching with greedy fingers towards the trees, only to be forced upwards by an great invisible shield of chakra, created by Lee with only a twitch of her fingers as she glared at their friend, Sauron, the kage of a wasteland.

 

“Shishou,” Obito hissed, desperately intervening before they had the brawl that they’d somehow managed to avoid this whole time, “He can burn it down if he wants to it’s not…”

 

“ _That,_ ” Lee said slowly, voice hard and dangerous, the tone that any man that knew her or knew of her would have started sprinting in the other direction at, “ _Took a lot of effort, and I know I make it look easy, but I’d appreciate at least an attempt at gratitude._ ”

 

He stared out, chakra simmering then falling flat, the fire burning out of his eyes as he looked out at the untouched trees, at his own flames fading into whispers of light and then nothing at all as he looked at a land he didn’t recognize.

 

Finally, his voice small and his words distant, he said, “ _When the valar and the maiar created Middle Earth, when Morgoth corrupted and poisoned it, it took… An age, it took almost an age. And this, this you have done in mere moments… What are you supposed to be?_ ”

 

He didn’t appear to want an answer to that or trust either of them to give one as he closed his eyes, breathed out, willed out all the emotion from himself until his old mask was firmly in place and he could say, simply, without any emotion at all, “ _I told you that I did not want this._ ”

 

Lee looked at her fingernails, shining in the dim light given off by her own skin as well as Sauron’s, and gave out a musing, “ _Yes, but you clearly secretly did._ ”

 

At his disbelieving and wrathful expression, she motioned out towards the trees, towards the gate in the distance, as if painting a picture for him, “ _Look, I like the mountains, very impressive, very nice, probably do a very good job of stopping an invading army. However, if they get past those mountains…_ ”

 

She held up a hand at his protest, before he could even say it, that a few trees would hardly stop a force of enemy ninja if they were so inclined, “ _I’m not saying that the river of lava isn’t intimidating and will probably stop civilian_ samurai _battalion or two, but I am saying that, well, trees are your friends. Certainly, trees and a great river are not a bad thing to have._ ”

 

“ _I did not ask for either!_ ” he hissed, eyes glowing once again, as if Lee had done far more than offer him a for gift but had instead spat in his face.

 

“You’ve made that quite clear,” Obito couldn’t help but mutter, in his own native tongue, as he looked at the trees still growing and pulsing with life and defiance even as their roots sank into poisoned earth and their reached leaves past the constant cloud cover.

 

Stubbornly defying all laws of nature, he thought, rather like Lee themselves in that respect.

 

“ _Well then, what do you want?_ ” Lee asked, hands thrown wide, shouting as she reached the limit of her own patience, “ _Obito isn’t wrong, you want something, and yet you refuse to say what it is._ ”

 

Oh Jesus, Obito couldn’t help but think, but there was nothing to be done and no talking Lee down from here. No, this was the destroyer of worlds in the flesh, the same woman who had stepped into Madara’s cave, stalking forward like red, burning death, who could slay the enemy with raw power and righteousness alone.

 

Sauron started, seeming to instinctively burn in defiance of her own rising killing intent, spitting out, “ _I do not want…_ ”

 

“ _Yes, you do!_ ” Lee stepped forward, finger poking him in the chest, killing intent exuding from every pore as she hissed, “ _And your playing this charade of polite ridiculous_ kage _grows more tiresome with every passing moment. As if you truly think that you can, that you must, subtly manipulate us into doing your bidding through games of_ chess _and conversations of broken Sindarin!_ ”

 

She reached forward, hands falling on the side of his fair face and twisting it down so that it was inches from her own, staring up with those terrible green eyes, “ _So tell me, Sauron, what is it that you really want? If it can’t be war upon your enemies, if it isn’t natural resources, then what is it that has you playing this ridiculous, pathetic, game with_ shinobi _who could swat you down like a presumptuous fly?_ ”

 

“Shishou,” Obito said again, if only to remind her that he was still here, that perhaps these were not words you said to a kage no matter how true they were. Neither however seemed to see him, locked in some silent battle of wills with the wind picking up between them as they just stared, waiting for the cracks to show in their opponent.

 

Finally, Sauron, if he didn’t break, then bent ever so slightly, he stepped back, his face out of Lee’s hands, his face flat and pale and without a hint of anger or irritation on it, and said shortly, “ _Burn down the forest and meet me in the tower._ ”

 

“ _The forest stays,_ ” Lee said, her lips twisting into a cruel smile at his look of affront and disbelief, “ _For your hubris, your charades, and your pride,_ arechi no kage _._ ”

 

Shadow of the wasteland, Arechikage, and despite not speaking a word of their own language the man seemed to understand for the bitter insult that it was. However, he said nothing, just smiled, and with a flash of light and fire flew back towards the tower.

 

Leaving Obito and Eru Lee staring after the comet’s tail he left behind.

 

“Was that really necessary, shishou?” Obito asked, eyebrows raised, watching as the tension rolled off her shoulders at his question. The kind of question he’d ask any other time Lee spun something entirely out of control.

 

“I like to think so,” Lee said, her smile drifting into something more amused and benign, a familiar expression that he’d grown so used to over the years of their apprenticeship, “Even you, Obito, were getting tired of it.”

 

“Well, of course I was getting goddamned tired of it,” Obito said, “It was insulting to all of us. Still, that doesn’t mean you had to say it to his face.”

 

Were either of them inclined towards infiltration, Obito thought, then the better path would probably have been to let the kage think whatever the hell he wanted rather than bluntly tell him to come up with some better way of convincing them.

 

“It needed to be said,” Lee said shortly, as if that, was going to be the end of that whether Obito agreed with or not.

 

Well, he supposed some of them probably learned something from this. Obito, for one, learned that their friend, kage of the wasteland, found trees personally offensive. To the point where he’d drop all pretenses to burn them to the ground and raze his own village. How useful this information would be, considering Lee had gone out and done it already, he didn’t know but it was at least something to keep in mind.

 

That Sauron really was as goddamned strange as he appeared and was giving Maito Gai a run for his money.

 

The turned back towards the tower in unison, walking across the bridge with Lee shoving the orcs out of the way and into the lava pit when they tried to strike at her with their pikes without any hint of concern or regret, and then up the great spiral staircases until they eventually tracked him down in the throne room.

 

“Oh my god,” Lee said, and Obito couldn’t help but silently agree as they both stopped in the entrance of the room, at the start of the regal carpet. Because it really was something of a ridiculous sight, there he was, sitting on the throne as if he was a king expecting Lee and Obito to kneel before his magnificence.

 

He was even wearing a crown of diamonds that shone so brightly they looked as if there were miniature fluorescent lightbulbs inside each jewel.

 

“I can’t even with this guy, Obito,” Lee said slowly, shaking her head in disbelief, failing to notice the rather irritated look that Sauron was now giving her, “I literally cannot even.”

 

“Well,” Obito said after a moment of staring with raised eyebrows, “At least he doesn’t look like he’s enjoying it.”

 

No, if anything, with Lee and Obito’s staring, he looked not just irritated but somewhat embarrassed, as if he had resorted to this in a fit of desperation. He stood, looking as if he was holding together the scraps of his dignity, took off the crown and placed it on the throne and then walked towards them with his arms crossed in irritation as if it was somehow Lee and Obito’s fault that he looked like a complete asshole.

 

Finally, he said, more than a little bitterly, “ _Must you two gossip in your native tongue every time you see me?_ ”

 

“ _Must you be so damned ridiculous?_ ” Lee asked, red eyebrows rising impossibly higher on her forehead, so that they disappeared beneath her shinobi’s headband.

 

He looked like he didn’t want to answer that, lips pursed, expression well… goddamned ridiculous as Lee had said, especially when juxtaposed with his angelic features. People that absurdly pretty didn’t get to wear that sort of nonplussed and exasperated expression on their face.

 

Finally, after what looked like great effort, he bit out, “ _I have considered your words and have decided to trade bluntness for bluntness, since you seem to expect the same lack of tact and generosity that you give._ ”

 

“I like how he phrases that as an insult,” Obito muttered to Lee, ignoring Sauron’s burning glare and flash of killing intent, as if he really was just letting loose with his emotions now that, apparently, Lee and Obito had offended him to the point of being honest.

 

“ _There is a task I believe you two might be able to aid me with_ ,” he said, the shadows in the room stretching beneath his burning temper, “ _The same task given to the nazgûl when they mistakenly collected you some weeks ago now._ ”

 

“Oh, goddammit,” Lee said, eyes wide as she realized what he had to mean, what he must mean and yet couldn’t possibly mean.

 

Sauron paid no mind though, seeming to burn from the inside as he said, “ _Baggins, a creature called a hobbit from a distant western land called the Shire, has stolen a ring of great importance to me. It will look ordinary, plain and golden, however throw it in fire and words in the black speech will appear in letters of flame on its surface. Find it and deliver it to me and I shall forge a sword for you the likes of which Arda has never seen before as well as negotiate for further trade with your people._ ”

 

Shire Baggins, that goddamned midget Shire Baggins, how did everything circle back to that sexy assassin? And why was Obito not surprised that the midget had had the gall to steal from a kage?

 

“We’re cursed, Obito,” Lee said quietly, eyes still wide, face pale as she so clearly remembered their first surreal night in this strange country, “You and I are cursed.”

 

Obito couldn’t help but agree, shuddering as he wondered if he was up to resisting that genjutsu, which had been all but consuming even with the sharingan inside of his head. And oh god, he didn’t want to lose his virginity to that.

 

Lee cringed, shuddering slightly, then asked, “ _Are you sure you don’t want the trees?_ ”

 

He smiled, that polite, Minato-esque smile that had always set Obito on edge but made no pretense of hiding his irritation and rage beneath that as he said, “ _I hate trees. I will accept the one ring, nothing more, and nothing less._ ”

 

And he really, truly, seemed to mean that.

 

“You just had to go and make him a forest, didn’t you, shishou?” Obito asked bitterly, sighing even as he admitted defeat to himself, “This might just be the worst mission we’ve undertaken.”

 

“Well, on the bright side,” Lee said, pausing for a moment as she tried and failed to think of a bright side, “On the bright side he may not resort to sexy genjutsus when he’s not trying to put hunter nin off of his trail and on to ours.”

 

At Obito’s disbelieving look she added, “And we can always just kill and or maim him before he even gets the chance to start.”

 

And Sauron, even if he was listening to Obito and Lee bicker in a language he couldn’t understand, gave them a truly awful smile.


	8. Chapter 8

_Part Eight: A pair of shinobi track down a fellowship, words are exchanged and a truly cunning and admirable escape plan is hatched, and a seed of doubt is planted._

* * *

 

Fortunately, Baggins of the Shire was such a brazen asshole of a shinobi, leaking chakra all over the place like he was all but putting a neon sign above his head, that even without a real sensor or tracker between the pair of them, both Lee and even Obito had no problem getting a general direction to start in.

 

Which was good, because as far as other details, Sauron had started to get a little stingy and impatient towards the end of their briefing. Perhaps it was the trees, perhaps it was Lee, perhaps it was an unholy combination of Lee and trees but either way Obito suspected that half of this mission wasn’t so much fetching his beloved family heirloom or whatever the hell this ring was but getting Lee and Obito the hell out of his village without formally kicking them out and burning bridges.

 

Apparently, after the tree episode, they all realized that maybe they could use some space from one another.

 

He’d given them an aged map written on some rather expensive looking parchment in letters that neither Lee nor Obito could understand, instructions to head west and that the fastest route through the mountains was to go through something called the Gap of Rohan, stick to the road closest to the mountains, avoid any hint of trees because elf shinobi would come and arrow them to death, to just try and avoid everyone no matter what they looked like because everyone would just assume they were a spy and try to violently kill them, and then he’d told them to kindly get out because he had things to do, armies to train, weapons to forge, wars to prepare for, and he was as tired of being a gracious host as they were of watching him be so very gracious.

 

Which clearly just meant Sauron didn’t appreciate their lack of appreciation…. Or the trees. Obito, somehow, couldn’t help but think that it was somehow mostly the goddamn trees.

 

So, there they were, him and Lee standing outside the great gate of Barad-dûr and looking out towards the west, the single clear path towards the mountains that Lee had left clear of trees, and the great black gate that led into Mordor with nothing but the packs on their backs, the weapons on their belt, and the map they both held out between them.

 

“You know,” Lee commented, as she stared down at him, “I ran almost all of this, I know I did, but seeing it on a map…”

 

“None of it looks familiar?” Obito asked, and Lee frowned further, bringing the map closer to her face.

 

“I have no idea how we got here,” she muttered, then pointed to the miniscule gap between the mountains, “That, I think, I remember… There were certainly a lot of mountains and then a river, and then passing through the mountains without having to climb over them.”

 

“Well, maybe it would be easier if we knew where we’d started,” Obito said, “Or if either of us could read.”  


“I do feel very illiterate,” Lee muttered, frowning further, then pointing to the general area of the northwest, “Maybe… from here? I feel like we went south and then east for, you know, a while… God, that was a lot of running.”

 

She sighed, folded the map and vanished it into some other time or place where she stored all of her things, and then said, “I suppose it doesn’t really matter, Shire Baggins is so, well, himself that I’m sure he’d all but hand us directions.”

 

For a shinobi, he kind of was. Even now Obito, if he concentrated, could feel that faint, distant, pull towards the west, a challenge almost or an invitation. Obito grimaced, hands shoved into his pockets as he noted, “Why does it concern me that he’s so eager to be found?”

 

“Because it concerns me,” Lee said rather drily, crossing her arms and sighing, “And usually I’m above such concerns.”

 

Rather than take the first steps beyond the newly refurbished Barad-dûr into the terraformed Mordor which now sported birds happily twittering in the newly grown trees, they continued to stand there, both staring out towards the black gate and the world that lay beyond it.

 

Finally, Obito noted, “You know, shishou, we don’t have to do this. We could go home.”

 

They probably should go home, it was practically time for rendezvous and if they weren’t travelling at, well, the hellish pace set by the nin horsemen, then it’d likely take weeks to even get back over to the west let alone getting back to Barad-dûr.

 

More importantly, they could write Sauron, arechikage, off entirely and just, well, not come back and maybe see instead what these elves were all about. Perhaps he was even counting on it, this could be his subtle and ridiculous way to just throw them off his lawn and wash his hands of them. Except, no, Obito didn’t think so, the man had been trying for weeks now and despite all but throwing them out he’d promised to work on what they wanted and had at least seemed sincere.

 

One way or another, Obito thought, the man expected to see them again.

 

Lee sighed, “We could, we should, for a day or a few days at least and perhaps to gather more supplies, fill out paperwork, get all of that done now that we have some idea of what we’re dealing with but… This is not an unreasonable mission.”

 

Obito just gave her a look, as if to remind her exactly who they were dealing with, stuck as they were between one unreasonable kage and an entirely unreasonable missing nin. Lee just gave him a smile, noting, “Take our sexy midget friend the missing nin out of the equation and it’s starting to look like the sort of mission that we might be assigned by a daimyo. Recovering a lost heirloom, bringing in the thief, it’s not unreasonable.”

 

Lee shrugged, “It’s worth, at the very least, an attempt and then we come back and see exactly what it is he means to bargain with. The way I see it, it’s not too much skin off our noses.”

 

Still, neither of them took a step forward, just stood there staring out towards the west as if both were just waiting for something to happen. Some comet or meteor to hit that would have them saying, “Well, we tried, it’s just too bad we can’t hunt down that ridiculous genjutsu master, isn’t it?”

 

Probably because they were standing there like jackasses, his lord and highness Sauron, arechikage, after staring down at them with his fiery gaze looking and feeling like some kind of unholy spotlight, descended as a fiery comet down the top of the dark tower to land next to Obito in his far too pretty human form as he leveled an entirely unamused glare at them, “ _Are you leaving or are you just going to stare?_ ”

 

Oh, he really had completely dumped civility, hadn’t he? Obito supposed it was nice to see the man’s true colors but he wouldn’t say that his chronic irritation and Lee and Obito doing, well, whatever, wasn’t equally grating.

 

“ _Stare_ ,” Obito said shortly, eyebrows lowered, ignoring Sauron’s look of dull disbelief that Obito had actually dared to say that.

 

“ _It’s a very nice view,_ ” Lee added, like she was commenting on the weather or politely inquiring after Sauron’s health, “ _I especially like the trees._ ”

 

“ _And the river,_ ” Obito added as Lee nodded, as if this was the most natural conversation in the world and of course they both liked the beautiful, crystal clear, river that now snaked down from the mountains.

 

“ _Oh, yes, and the river, the river’s very nice._ ”

 

Sauron said nothing for entirely too many seconds, just looked down at them as if he couldn’t believe they were actual people, which, to be fair, was not an uncommon reaction to seeing Lee or Lee and Obito in person.

 

Finally, he said, almost as if in wonder, “ _Surely, your own people, find you just as obnoxious as I do._ ”

 

Lee looked as if she wanted to dearly refute that, opened her mouth, closed it, then finally said, rather nonplussed and with large, green, eyes that showed no expression at all, “ _I resent that._ ”

 

Obito wanted to add, also, that odd personalities and little quirks were rampant in shinobi populations. It was just a part of the job, you had to cope, and coping mechanisms could get… Extremely strange. Suddenly, Obito had the overbearing need to bring Maito Gai to this god forsaken country if only to parade him in green spandex glory, sparkles, and that white grin and show Sauron just how bad it could get.

 

Even Bakashi, Obito thought, would more than prove the point.

 

Plus, Sauron turned into a giant fiery eyeball and had an irrational hatred of trees, he had no room to talk.

 

Unfortunately, Obito just lacked the words and fluency for that kind of point, so he just sighed, shook his head, and started walking towards the distant black gate, “You heard him, shishou, let’s get this over with already. The sooner we do it the sooner I never have to think of any of this ever again.”

 

Lee followed, catching up to him easily, and over her shoulder waived goodbye to Sauron, who, even now, was madly dashing back up to the top of his tower while Lee shouted, “ _You do not get to burn down the forest while we’re gone!_ ”

 

And with that they were off, walking, following that distant beacon of chakra to the west until they were out of the black gates, walking further until they were miles and miles past Mordor and passing through a great white city along a swiftly flowing river, pausing for a few days to return to Konoha, and then walking again for weeks upon weeks as, like a distant mountain that seemed so close and yet so far, they kept walking towards that distant western call of Shire Baggins’ chakra.

 

“It really is a beautiful continent,” Obito said at one point, passing underneath the shadow of yet more mountains upon a rather well-trod road, golden fields and grassland reminiscent of Kusa on their other side, staring up at the clear blue sky with only a few hints of white clouds rolling through.

 

“Yes,” Lee noted, “It makes you wonder why Sauron insists on liking terrible things.”

 

Obito laughed but he couldn’t disagree, even now, it seemed… Almost as if, in a strange way, choosing to live in a wasteland like Mordor and building a fortress there was more to prove some bitter point rather than any real enjoyment.

 

Then again, stepping out from the shadow of his country, Obito couldn’t help but think that this was a reminder that they really knew nothing about Sauron, about this country, about anything at all. They’d just thrown themselves into this strange new world, hoping for the slightest bit of breathing room when it was all they could do to keep from drowning.

 

The road was curiously empty despite looking well-traveled. There were few carts, fewer traveling peddlers and merchants than Obito would have expected, but instead just a long empty and winding road, and every once in a while, desperately fleeing families who would only look at Lee and Obito with a sharp fear at their foreign appearances and foreign blades before practically sprinting past them.

 

It was a country at war, or at least, just on the knife’s edge of war. There was that familiar tension to the air, a strange indescribable thing that was almost a scent in and of itself, that had haunted Obito for most of his life and had been so present in his childhood that it had almost become ordinary. So that now, after the third war was over, the thought of somehow being at peace, of it being over, made him itch.

 

If you looked out towards the north, away from the mountains, you could make out great funeral pyres in the distance, thick black smoke, as bodies were burnt en masse. More, occasionally, on the main road Lee and Obito dutifully followed to the northwest, hulking demon men, the ones Sauron had called orcs, would huddle in bands, waiting to ambush unaware travelers, rape their women, and then devour their flesh.

 

If Lee decided to, each time, dispose of them and leave their carcasses for the carrion crows then Obito didn’t say anything about it one way or another. Would just step over their strangely black blood, their yellow glazed eyes, and would keep looking towards the west.

 

Still, it was like Sauron had said, Obito thought with some wry bitterness as they made their way closer and closer to the mountains, this was a terrible time to be a foreigner seeking trade.

 

They followed the winding road to the Gap of Rohan, and from there, with only Baggins’ chakra to guide them, began to climb high up into the glacial peaks of the mountains, the wind bitter and cold as Obito and Lee expended far too much chakra to walk on the surface of the snow, but Baggins chakra, that constant genjutsu of desire and compulsion, growing impossibly strong as they drew ever closer.

 

So, it was with these thoughts in mind that they finally, after weeks of through fields and mountains, tracked down their old friend Shire Baggins, who, in the months since they’d left him to his own devices, hadn’t grown a single inch and appeared to have picked up his own variety of new friends.

 

Baggins and company were staggering up the mountain path, seemingly completely oblivious to Lee and Obito watching their progress from higher snow topped peaks, at an appallingly embarrassed civilian pace. Among them only a blonde archer shinobi, whose facial features were of the same ridiculously attractive brand that Sauron’s were, bothered to walk on the surface of the snow rather than wade waist deep through it like the rest of them.

 

And they moved so very slowly, not even at a civilian pace anymore, but at the pace you’d expect dying cripples to move at as they slowly but surely waded their way towards the summit of the mountains.

 

It had to be, Obito thought, one of the most blatantly insulting displays he’d ever seen in his life.

 

“That bastard,” Lee said, as if she couldn’t quite decide between whether she was in awe or else appalled, “He’s formed a harem.”

 

Obito looked at her, looked back at Baggins, staggering at the back of the pack, and could only wish he disagreed. In the backwater civilian village, in the pub, he’d started with three, moved his way up to four with his hapless chunin victim of the day, and how now upgraded to eight.

 

Except, he frowned, felt his stomach plummet as he got a closer look, “Oh, no, no, you can’t mean that.”

 

“What else could it be?” Lee asked him with raised eyebrows but Obito motioned towards the group in despair as he took in finer details.

“Oh, come on, shishou, that one’s decades older than the sandaime,” Obito said, motioning to a gray cloaked old man in the front in a truly ridiculous hat worthy of England, even now stubbornly insisting on wading through mounds of snow and clearing a path despite having more than enough chakra to spare walking on top of it.

 

Obito pointed further down the line, skipping past the pretty blonde as well as the poor dark haired chunin who apparently had been stuck with Baggins for months now, and the other more red-headed man who while he didn’t have much chakra at all was at least a respectable adult height, “And he’s picked up another midget with the worst looking beard I’ve ever seen and he’s kept the other three midgets around who look like they shouldn’t have stepped foot out of their daycare and he’s… Oh, I don’t even know what the hell he’s doing, taking them on some extreme tourism adventure in the mountains.”

 

Certainly, most of them looked like they had no business wandering around at these altitudes.

 

“Well, Obito,” Lee said after a pause, taking in the menagerie of men with quite the variety of chakra coming from them as well as this ridiculous display, “Some like it hot.”

 

“You are not allowed to use that word in this context!” Obito hissed, glaring at the entirely unapologetic Lee.

 

Lee held up her hands in defense, sniffing as she said, “I’m just saying, Obito, that he’s still pumping out the come hither genjutsu like no one’s business, in the middle of the wilderness, and since none of them are running in the other direction…”

 

And she wasn’t wrong, even now, even unseen hidden behind white peaks, Obito could almost hear the chakra pulsing in his head, brushing fingers against his skin, calling him down and promising dark delights that he’d never even known he’d wanted and…

 

“Goddammit, shishou!” Obito hissed, “Weren’t the mental images of the chunin in the seedy inn enough?”

 

“You must suffer as I suffer,” Lee quipped.

 

She looked as if she was about to say more, perhaps to wonder how the old man of the harem performed in bed (and seriously, Obito supposed he was appreciative of variety in hypothetical harems, but an old man? An old man that old? Normally people settled for having some good-looking bastard with glasses, or a set of twins) but both fell silent at the sight of poor staggering Baggins, looking for all the world like a helpless kitten, stumbling and then tumbling backward several yards in the snow only to be caught by his old friend, the poor dark haired chunin from the inn.

 

“He… Does he know we’re here?” Obito asked slowly, as they watched him pick himself up and brush snow off himself, patting himself down for something as if he’d lost something of grave importance in the fall, “Or does he just take every opportunity, regardless of who’s watching, to be as mocking and insulting as possible?”

 

“I…” Lee started, trailing off as she watched, shaking her head, “I have no answers, actually, I think the less I understand this guy the better.”

 

“So, no time like the present?” Obito asked, nodding towards her, noting the various power levels and that while the old man appeared to be a jonin, the blonde was bad, and they had their dark haired chunin friend, only Baggins was worth fleeing from in any capacity.

 

Lee nodded, a spark of determination growing on her features, “Let’s hit and run.”

 

In tandem Lee and Obito jumped down from behind the gray peak and landed just in front of Frodo and the chunin. Swords were drawn, axes and staves held aloft, and arrows notched into wooden bows, at the sight of them Lee merely raised her eyebrows twitched her fingers and hurled all the weapons backwards down the path where they gleamed in the sunlight.

 

“ _That was rather impolite,_ ” Lee noted in Sindarin, but none answered, they just quietly stared, gritting teeth and preparing themselves for a taijutsu brawl against shinobi who still held their kunai.

 

Then, Baggins said something, pointing towards the pair of them in horrified recognition, something that very clearly wasn’t in Sindarin or anything else recognizable either. Lee and Obito stared, looked at him, looked at each other, Obito now with a vague suspicion that Sauron might have taught them a completely useless language for shits and giggles, and Lee decided to apparently pick up where they left off as if they all could understand a word they were saying, “ _Yes, well, we have come regarding a ring you have stolen from an eastern king. Give it to me and we can all go our separate ways without bloodshed._ ”

 

Lee held out her hand in impatience, half gloved fingers pale in the bitter cold, waiting for Shire Baggins to just fork it over already so they could all go home. No one moved, Baggins pale blue eyes widening in fear but also silent determination to tell her nothing. At seeing their lack of movement, she then pantomimed a ring, drawing a circle with her fingers, slipping her index finger through the curled index finger of her other hand like a ring, and waited for some sign of comprehension.

 

Somehow, Obito thought, Lee’s attempt at charades was just making this worse.

 

“What happened to hitting and running?” Obito couldn’t help but ask drily as he looked around at the group, pulling out a kunai from his pouch in warning as he surveyed every one of them, waiting for one of them to make the first move.

 

“Who am I to break up this happy couple?” Lee asked, then paused, and noted, “Well… man harem? More to the point, if he’s willing to be reasonable I’d rather deal with that than whatever he’s capable of when panicking under ambush.”

 

Obito supposed that was a fair enough point, as they’d have to pick who to eliminate first, and by the size of Baggins chakra he’d hardly make it easy. And goddammit it was hard to concentrate with that genjutsu, even now Obito felt like his brain was all but leaking out of his ears. That alone could be why Lee was choosing to stall rather than strike, because like this, neither of them could be entirely on top of their game.

 

Except, it could just be him, but it was as if Obito couldn’t quite focus on any of them, even Baggins, like he’d moved the source of the genjutsu, his chakra even, to be somewhere else, just behind him and hanging over his shoulder. It kept itching at Obito’s concentration and focus and look back up the conga line of unfortunate men, no doubt leaving Baggins the moment he needed to stab him and Lee in the back and scamper on his merry way.

 

“ _You are servants of Sauron?_ ” this was spat out by the too pretty blonde, not a question so much as an accusation, as if even standing in their path was to make them in and of themselves abhorrent creatures unworthy of the deepest pits of hell.

 

Obito, with some amusement, thought that he hadn’t even looked at Madara the way this bastard was looking at him and Lee.

 

“ _Hardly, more… temporarily employed on a trial basis,_ ” Lee responded drily before looking straight at Baggins once again, “ _I’d rather not have to kill you or your friends, something I don’t think you’ll get from the_ hunter nin _of Barad-dûr. If I were you, I would get out while the going is good and take me up on my offer._ ”

 

Then, looking at the rest of them as if she could no longer contain it, she cried out in disgust as she motioned towards all of them, “ _And the rest of you, come on, go home. I mean, I know that he’s very… attractive, or you think he’s attractive, but this is just sad. I don’t care what ecstasy and earthly delights he’s promised you in his mountainside manor, it’s not worth it! You, well, except for you and you and maybe you over there, could do so much better than this. Just… Make better choices in life!_ ”

 

They appeared to have nothing to say to that, no words at all, in fact a few of mouths were dropping open, their chunin friend, the archer, and the old man all looked at one another then looked away as if not quite sure they’d heard her right. The rest all looked at them, clearly waiting for some explanation or translation that none wanted to give.

 

Which, Obito bet they didn’t, it was probably easier on all their egos, even under genjutsu, if they just pretended that none of it was happening.

 

Baggins took a step forward, then stopped, face pale as his eyes fell on Obito’s glinting kunai except… No, no he was looking behind Obito. Finally, Obito gave in to temptation and turned while Lee kept her eyes on Baggins, sharingan flickering on, and felt his eyes widen as he stared in what had to be the face of the sun. There, held by the brown-haired man with the sword and shield, was what only looked like a plain golden ring but was instead a beacon of compelling chakra twisted into an ever-flowing circle of gold and fire.

 

Dormant and only whispering for now, but ready to burn brighter than any start at the first opportunity.

 

“Shishou,” Obito said slowly, feeling the words scrape against his throat as he said them, “I think we found it.”

 

Lee stopped, turned, watching as the man said something in some foreign language, eyes burning with righteous determination and the look of a man who knew there were no other paths left, while in his hand he held his golden salvation and damnation in the form of something so small, so terribly simple, and yet so glorious beneath that.

 

“The hell is that?” Lee asked just as quietly, clearly seeing or feeling at least some of what Obito saw.

 

The man moved to put it on his finger, the rest shouting and moving towards him, but Lee was faster as she tackled him to the ground, grabbed the chain as well as the ring and snatching it out of his grasp.

 

What, Obito thought distantly as he looked down on it, had Baggins dared to steal from a hidden village?

 

Then, carefully, eyes on the man, on everyone, she stood back up and walked backward until she was standing shoulder to shoulder with Obito. She looked, once, over towards Baggins, now looking at them with abject terror, and said in a voice too calm, “ _You’re a fool, Baggins._ ”

 

She and Obito moved away then, springing down the mountain path and past the swords, axe, bow, and staff, down towards the Gap of Rohan then back towards the east even as the dark haired chunin cried after them in desperation and despair, “ _You fools, when you deliver it to him, he will destroy us all and you along with us! Whatever he has promised you, he is lying, he will always lie! There is only one lord of the rings!_ ”

 

And then, soon enough, even the echoes of their words were gone and it was only Lee, Obito, and Sauron’s golden ring which wasn’t a ring at all.


	9. Chapter 9

_Part Nine: Our shinobi heroes discuss just what it is they might be carrying, are surprised by a violent turn of events, and Obito more than lives up to his estranged family name._

 

* * *

 

They ended up making camp far too early in the eastern foothills of the mountains, close to the Gap of Rohan and more importantly, the road that he and Lee had taken that had brought them to the mountains in the first place. Taking it again, assuming they went at a decent pace and didn’t run into trouble, they should arrive back at the black gates of Mordor within a week or so.

 

Looking out the entrance of the small cave they’d commandeered for camp, Obito noted a great winding river streaming by in the valley below as well as, to the north, a distant dark tower which was not so different from the highest tower of Barad-Dûr where, presumably, even now Sauron chanted westward in desperation or else madness.

 

Behind him though, along with the small fire Lee had set up and the dozens upon dozens of interlinking genjutsus to ward off attention and any threat, a sun’s worth of chakra burned and beckoned all at once. If he didn’t look at it, it was like he could forget it was a ring, instead imagined burning fingers reaching up over his shoulder and pulling him backwards, lips curving against his ear and whispering in a clear and bell-like voice, “ _Obito, you know that you do not have the power to change the world alone. You have always been painfully aware of the power you lack._ ”

 

He shuddered, breathed out and closed his eyes, then turned back to Lee, the fire, and the ring. She had her shoes and headband off, her hair was now unbraided and curling in every direction, and she looked half in uniform and half out of it as she warmed her pale feet and hands against the flames.

 

Next to her on the floor of the cavern, looking so innocuous, was the plain golden ring which, even now, compelled and whispered.

 

Obito stiffly walked to Lee’s side where he sat next to her, their shoulders touching, mimicking her actions and holding out his hands (one whole and pale, the other rigid with scars and never quite as dexterous as it had once been) to the flames. Staring into the fire, he liked to think that he was looking anywhere but at the ring. However, as absurd as it sounded, he didn’t think that meant the ring wasn’t looking at him.

 

“ _It wasn’t so unlike this cave, was it, Obito? Somewhere hidden in Lightning’s mountains where no one would ever think to look for you even if they had stopped to wonder if you were still alive. It was a miracle she found you, or perhaps, it was only her that could have found you._ ”

Yes, he thought, it wasn’t so unlike this cave. If he closed his eyes he could imagine the creaking and rustling of the various Zetsus, Madara’s dry and parched laugh and the way he would leer over towards Obito, and how it was always so cold…

 

“ _If she had not come for you, Obito, how long do you think you could have lasted? Would you have lasted until Madara simply killed you in favor of some more biddable apprentice? You know you would have cracked, sooner or later, and then there would have been nothing left of you. Only a puppet unworthy of his own given name, something to be abhorred, Sauron in your own right._ ”

 

Obito couldn’t help but bitterly chuckle, wanting to cover his ears even though he knew full well that the voice was only in his head, or rather the memories were only in his head with the genjutsu using them against him. The sharingan, he had always thought, was meant to shield him from things like this. What good was it, this eye his family had all but worshipped, that so many clans had coveted, that had gotten him thrown out of his own clan, when it couldn’t even allow him to step past a single genjutsu that didn’t even bother to be a full illusion?

 

Only a compulsion and temptation.

 

He imagined the voice almost drawing him closer, arms tightening around Obito as its voice grew louder, “ _Take me, Uchiha Obito, claim more than your own birthright, more than the birthright of the Senju thrust upon you, and take the power to revolutionize the world. Take me, Obito, before she does._ ”

 

Obito couldn’t help but look up at Lee then, jarred out of his trance as he took in the image she made of something only half civilized, something still bright and burning even when only painted in flickering firelight. More, if this cave echoed Madara’s, then it only made sense that she was in it as well because she had been there. Maybe she had been out of place, maybe there was a world in which she hadn’t been, but the point was that she had stepped into that cave and pulled him out.

 

He laughed then, more fully and freely, as he realized the ring, whatever it was, didn’t know Eru Lee at all. Lee, he was certain, had no interest in such materialistic things.

 

Lee looked over at him, eyes green and more alien than any sharingan could hope to be, and a sly sort of smile curved upwards on her lips, “I think I’ll take a stab in the dark and say that our friend the genjutsu master, is, perhaps, not Shire Baggins.”

 

Obito laughed, whole body shaking as he shook his head and tried to get a grip on his thoughts, “You know, shishou, I think you might be right.”

 

No, Shire Baggins might not be anything at all, not even a ninja. Perhaps he had just been some plaything of the ring, some unfortunate hapless victim just like the rest of them. A thing to get it from point a to point b without anyone the wiser…

 

Except how and why he’d ended up with the ring then, how he’d stolen it from a kage and taken it that far west, was now a complete and utter mystery.

 

“Although what business a piece of jewelry has whispering sweet nothings is quite beyond me,” Lee said with almost an annoyed sigh, as if the genjutsu was really more of a nuisance than anything else, the equivalent of some drunk civilian insisting on hitting on her in a bar and refusing to take no for an answer, “Though I suppose that sexual deviancy doesn’t have to exclusively belong to animate beings.”

 

Obito glanced over at the ring, wondering if it was his imagination, or if, for a moment, the genjutsu had almost stuttered. As if the caster had choked on his own words, only for a second, before pulling himself together again and desperately pretending that slip had never happened.

 

Although that left him wondering if he was prescribing too much personality to a ring even if Lee was willing to prescribe it a sex drive.

 

Still, as absurd as it was, that didn’t change the fact that Obito wanted it. He wanted it, whatever the hell it even was, more than he’d wanted anything in his life. More, even, he thought with a numb sort of horror, than he wanted Rin.

 

(Obito had never been good at not going after the things he truly wanted…)

 

Swallowing thickly, he asked with his voice scraping against his throat, “What should we do with it, shishou?”

 

Lee gave a small hum of thought, glanced over at the ring and the way it glittered in the firelight, then said with a shrug, “I’m not sure, what do you think, Obito?”

 

He didn’t know either.

 

Part of him, the shinobi’s paranoia part that had only been sharpened in Madara’s cave, wanted to get rid of it as quickly as possible. Thrust it into Suaron’s eager hands, thrust it back onto Baggins, or even just throw it off the mountain and down into the river below, it didn’t matter. Just so that it was gone and he never had to look at it or hear it ever again.

 

The other part though, perhaps the very heart of him that yearned, and wanted, and defied every expectation of stoicism the clan had ever thrust on him, wanted to reach over and pick it up off the floor, twist his fingers around its golden surface, stare at his own warped reflection in the metal band, and then perhaps slip it on his finger if only…

 

“I… I don’t know,” he finally echoed, then forcing himself to look back at Lee, who as always was a pillar of stability in an unseen raging storm, and he asked, “Why would he send us, shishou, for something like this?”

 

This was not a family heirloom, this was not something you asked foreign shinobi to retrieve and deliver to you, this wasn’t even an excuse to throw someone out of your village unofficially but instead the equivalent of…

 

Of perhaps retrieving and returning a rogue jinchuuriki if not something more valuable, powerful, and terrible than that.

 

“Perhaps he thinks we wouldn’t notice,” Lee said her voice far more serious than it usually was, her face, in a way, as alien and terribly beautiful as Sauron’s could be, “Or, maybe, he doesn’t really care either way.”

 

“Doesn’t care?!” Obito spluttered, trying to imagine anyone (well, anyone besides Lee at least) being perfectly indifferent to the ring or Sauron being perfectly indifferent to the fact that they could so easily take it and run.

 

“Sure,” Lee said, giving Obito a rather pointed look, “Maybe us recognizing it, us taking it, us doing anything at all makes no difference to him one way or another.”

 

Maybe, Obito realized, this was the sort of trap whose jaws had closed the moment they laid eyes on it. That even if they took it, if Obito took it something would happen and… Obito noticed his hands shaking violently against the fire, and with concentrated effort, he stilled them.

 

“Well, I suppose we have one way to find out,” Lee said with a sigh, picking up the ring and giving it a sort of dull and unimpressed look before slipping it off the chain and into the fire. Obito gave out a cry, reaching for it, but Lee shot out a hand to hold him back from scrambling after it. They both watched as, on the golden surface, just as Sauron said, words in fire and foreign characters etched themselves on the surface.

 

(And perhaps it was just Obito, perhaps he was going half-mad already, but they somehow looked familiar. As if he had seen or heard these words somewhere before despite the fact that he couldn’t read a single character of it.)

 

Lee wordlessly summoned it out of the flames, watching as it hovered just above the palm of her hand, the words on the surface fading with the lack of heat. After a moment her eyes widened, the ring reflected inside of them, and she said almost in awe, “It’s fuinjutsu.”

 

“What?” Obito asked.

 

“Once, before jinchuuriki, the great tailed beasts were sealed into inanimate objects,” Lee said, her voice distant as if she was caught in the past, “Only with Uzumaki Mito did the hidden villages begin sealing them into human beings for use in war. And once, the English nin sealed a vast portion of his own chakra into a little girl…”

 

She looked younger, for a moment, with her hair unbound and her eyes wide. She looked, he thought, like the little girl she was referring to. Smaller, younger, and so very uncertain with someone’s chakra sealed into a scar on her forehead…

 

“Something sentient, tailed beast or even human, is inside of this ring,” she whispered, in awe and almost horror as she finally allowed it to wobble in the air and then fall into the palm of her hand, “Someone’s soul is inside of this gilded prison.”

 

Lee breathed out, a great forced exhale, then carefully set the ring back down onto the floor beside her. When her eyes opened they were harder, older, and her voice was that of a jonin when she said, “It’s not our business either way. We’ll hit the road in the morning, make up for lost time with Shire Baggins and company undoubtedly on our tails, and take the main road eastward.”

 

She flopped backwards with an oomph, staring at the firelight playing off the ceiling, then asked, “Do you want me to take first watch?”

 

He just stared, and for a moment he wondered just how much she heard it, or if she was somehow more immune than he was. She recognized the pull, certainly, but she didn’t even seem to have the need to look at it. She had held it in her hand, had looked at it with horror, pity, and wonder but there had been no desire there…

 

While Obito, without having dared to touch it at all, knew that if he did go to sleep his dreams would be golden and filled with fire.

 

“You sleep,” he said, “I’ll take first watch.”

 

In the end though, he ended up staying up the whole night, watching as dawn rose over the river and the mountains, all with the feeling that the ring was laughing at Obito’s stubborn pride, as if that didn’t make any difference in the world.

 

They both know he would have cracked soon enough with Uchiha Madara.

 

On waking up with the dawn Lee didn’t say anything of him not waking her for second watch, just stared at him, and he wondered if she could read every thought in his head without trying. There was something so… He didn’t know, indescribable, inside of her gaze.

 

Something tender, filled with memory, fearful and hopeful all at once, old and cold but filled with an almost overwhelming light. Her eyes, he thought, had looked like that all those years ago when she’d held her hand out towards him in that cave, stepping over what was left of Madara and the Zetsus.

 

After braiding her hair, placing her headband on once again, and picking up the ring again by the chain she held out her free hand once again, “Ready, Obito?”

 

He stepped forward, fingers still shaking even as he took her hand, but then almost without thinking he blurted, “Shishou, I think… I think I should carry the ring.”

 

She said nothing, just looked at him, eyes almost glowing in the early morning light and that flat sadness inside them only seemed to grow stronger. As if she had resigned herself to watch, no matter where this might lead, just as she had resigned herself to watch as Namikaze Minato had once walked away from her with Uzumaki Kushina’s hand in his.

 

“Are you sure?” Lee asked, not why, not what it would accomplish, but are you sure Obito?

 

“ _You could never hold out for eternity, Obito, not even a year. You have always, at your heart, been weak._ ”

 

He bit his lip, looked down at the floor, anywhere but at her and the ring, and his hand squeezed hers. Still though, he said, almost as if the words were beaten out of him, “Yes, yes, shishou, I’m sure.”

 

The ring, as Lee placed it into his hand, was almost warm, its chakra burned so fiercely and so brightly. Curling his fingers around it, he remembered, that he had once seen a future that had never happened. He had seen himself, what Madara had made him, burning down Konoha with the nine tailed fox as his puppet, an echo of Madara himself from so many years ago. Obito had been so afraid of that, of what he could have been, and yet…

 

And yet he somehow felt the closer to that Obito, the Obito without any name at all, with the ring in his hand, than he ever had before.

 

“ _You could be so much more than that, than what you are now, if you simply took it._ ”

 

With great difficulty, gritted teeth and a stifled cry, he took the chain and slipped the ring instead around his neck where it settled beneath his shirt and against his chest. It was underestimating him, Obito thought bitterly to himself, because even if he was broken already Obito would not break. Not like this, not for this thing, whoever or whatever it was supposed to be.

 

“Let’s go, shishou,” he said, striding out of the cave with all his packed belongings, not once looking back inside of it and the memories it contained.

 

All the way down the foothills and towards the path Obito could hear it inside his head, almost in time with his heartbeat, as he walked just behind Lee. The voice, it sounded familiar somehow, not like anyone he knew necessarily but like he should be able to place the owner, and with each step it just seemed to grow louder and more confident, “ _You try so hard, Obito, haven’t you always though? No natural talent to speak of, but if nothing else, you always try and pretend as if it doesn’t hurt. Would it be so difficult to, for just a moment, give in? To stop and rest and acknowledge that you can’t do it alone? That perhaps, Obito, you reached your potential long ago and anything you’ve earned since then has been through sheer perseverance or else misfortune?_ ”

 

What was it Lee had said, once, so many years ago from one of her many science fiction books, “To open yourself up to great power, Obito, is to make yourself infinitely vulnerable to even greater powers.”

 

The sharingan, he knew, had been the doorway for Madara. With its power and its potential, Obito knew he had been that much more of an enticing apprentice than even Kakashi. The mokuton, too, likely, would one day come back to bite him in the ass if it hadn’t somehow already.

 

He could see inside of his head the faceless, shapeless, chakra of the ring sneering at the very idea of that. Of contenting himself with being weak, of staying as he was, out of fear of becoming someone’s tool.

 

“ _It would be so easy, Obito._ ”

 

Yes, yes it would, all it would take was him slipping it on his finger. However, Obito had made it a point not to take the easier roads in life. He wouldn’t be where or what he was now, if he had ever found the easiest and shortest paths tempting.

 

His eyes drifted to Lee, who was smiling as they now reached the main road, leaping down from the last of the hills onto it and turning back towards him with an easy grin (as if the hard part was now over). He didn’t think she had ever even looked at the easier path.

 

“ _Are you the type now who follows your master’s every example?_ ” the voice mocked with a dull sort of impatience, “ _You once prided yourself on being so different from your family, on being able to think and feel for yourself. Now look at you, there isn’t an idea in your head or a word in your mouth that she hasn’t put there._ ”

 

Obito couldn’t help but grin as he raced down to join Lee, because really, if Obito had to pick some sort of a role model then Lee-shishou wasn’t a bad one. Perhaps, without even knowing it, without even knowing her, Obito had always wanted to be something like Eru Lee.

 

“ _And what of Nohara Rin_?”

 

Obito felt suddenly very cold, eyes wide, and stumbling forward at the question, “ _Do you have any idea how little of her shadow is left inside of you? That what you think is love, what you tell yourself is an endless, unconditional, and terrifying love is only an echo of what you, once, perhaps, felt? She’s slipping from you, inch by inch, and soon there will be nothing left of her inside of you at all._ ”

 

Unspoken was the implication, the accusation, that Eru Lee was the one stealing Rin from him. If Obito wanted Rin, if he ever wanted Rin, then he had to get rid of Lee.

 

Except, in his mind’s eye, he saw Lee staring after Minato-sensei, a mirror of himself staring after Rin. Love, she had told him, is not simple, not easy, and hardly pleasant. There were no guarantees of reciprocation, especially when it was unconditional.

 

The love of ballads did not translate well into the mortal plane, and if he didn’t have Rin now, if he had never had Rin and never would, then perhaps…

 

He looked up, noting a swarm of crows circling around them from the west, cawing en masse, and then returning from whence they came all too swiftly.

 

“What was that supposed to be?” he asked, blinking as he stared after them returning to the mountains.

 

“Crows,” Lee said rather blandly as she stared back up at the northwestern horizon, “I guess.”

 

Obito gave her something of a flat look, “I could tell that much, shishou, I’m not blind.”

 

Meanwhile the voice in his head, almost drily, brought up the image of Eru Lee possessing all the tact and subtlety of a brick wall while asking, “ _Are you sure you want to become that?_ ”

 

Well, no, Obito had no desire or intention of becoming Bakashi’s second coming (and therefore Lee’s third coming). He didn’t necessarily feel the impulse to slip into his own warped dialect of interdimensional pop-culture references (even if he now understood an embarrassing amount of them) or worship at the altar of television either.

 

An idea occurred to him, desperately he looked at Lee and asked, “Do you think they were summons?”

 

Lee frowned, lips turned downwards, “I always thought the Uchiha had the crow contract,” still, she looked out towards the east, towards the rest of the road, “Still, we should get moving.”

 

They picked up the pace, moving into a shinobi’s jog while Obito wondered if, perhaps, it was time to abandon the road. Except, the trouble was, that abandoning the road would get Lee and Obito god even knew where on god even knew who’s land. They were strangers here, hopeless strangers, and the road was the fastest and perhaps their only real path back to Mordor without Lee simply teleporting them there.

 

Still, he couldn’t help the feeling that something now was on their tail, something that should have been avoided if only they were more informed. Beneath his clothing the ring almost seemed to burn with the amount of chakra it was letting out.

 

(The ring, something whispered inside of his head, wanted to be found.)

 

“Shishou!” Obito cried out, not sure what he was going to say, but whatever it was he cut himself off as he skidded to a halt in the middle of the road through the golden fields. Staring out into the distance with the sharingan, past where even Lee could see, into the face of one of the hunter nin of Barad-Dûr flying straight towards them on the back of a black dragon.

 

“Holy shit,” Obito said, almost breathless, “They’ve updated to nin dragons.”

 

The ring, he thought, was crowing with delight and amusement inside of his head. As if now Lee and Obito were truly getting what they deserved, the hopeless fools.

 

Lee skidded to a halt with him, peered into the distance where Obito pointed, watching as it came close enough, directly towards them, to be in her line of vision as well. She whistled outward, “Well, damn.”

 

He looked around them, almost in desperation, but there was nowhere to hide, more even if they could hide he knew full well that they tracked by chakra and that with the combination of Lee as well as the ring they were an unholy beacon that would attract any sensor in the region.

 

“Shishou, what do we…” he trailed off, looked behind them, kept looking and could barely see, miles and miles in the distance, what looked like a band of warriors marching towards them on the open road with pikes in hand.

 

The dragon would overtake them momentarily, any moment spent fighting and evading him would bring the armed soldiers that much closer as well if not the other indomitable hunter nin, suddenly despite being on an open plane Obito felt more than trapped.

 

“Obito,” Lee said, her voice sounding like it must have during the third war, drawing her blade from its hilt so that it gleamed in the sunlight as she prepared to face a dragon, “Take the ring and keep going.” “Keep going?!” he asked but she didn’t even look at him, kept her eyes on the dragon.

 

“I’ll hold them off,” she said, no hint of a question of whether this was possible or not in her, that she could hold off any army or any dragons, “Throw them off the scent like Baggins did with us back in the bar, and then I’ll rendezvous with you further up the path.”

 

Then her eyes slid to him, bright and burning, and at seeing him standing there dumbly she cried out, “Just do it!”

 

Stiffly, and then forcing himself into a sprint, Obito ran forward on the road while behind him he could feel Lee’s chakra as a physical presence, masking Obito and the ring easily inside of it. With each step his mind raced through so many things, that Lee would be fine, that this was what Lee did and had done all through the third war, that this was what Eru Lee excelled at. More, that the hunter nin had come for them, come for them while they were on Sauron’s mission fetching his ring, Sauron had sent out the hunter nin and… Sauron had not even hesitated to double cross them.

 

No, not even just to double cross, but to humiliate them in death and prove himself some sort of a petty victor in a battle. Like this somehow proved that he was better than Lee and Obito and always would be no matter how many trees they planted.

 

With that Obito stopped dead in his tracks, stared out at the empty path ahead of him that would lead him to the black gates, and wondered why he and Lee were doing this? What good was honor in a bargain made with someone like this? Someone who had undoubtedly always planned to spit in their faces and shove a dagger into their backs.

 

Who Obito had suspected from the very beginning and was not even truly surprised at now. No, only surprised at the gall that he’d done it so quickly and without even waiting for Lee or Obito to get back.

 

Why should Sauron, Obito ask himself, get the ring?

 

He looked over his shoulder, breathing hard, too far now from the battle to see or hear any of it. Instead the road to the northwest was strangely and terribly empty, leaving a strange haunting thought that perhaps, against odds like that, even Lee might not survive it.

 

And he had just turned and ran, for a kage who had set a dragon on them.

 

Without thinking Obito pulled the chain from his neck so that the ring was dangling outside of his clothing. Such a small, strangely admirable, thing but filled with so much power and so much potential.

 

It almost sang, he thought, with anticipation.

 

He lifted it to eye level, watched the light reflecting off of it, as inviting as light reflecting off Konoha’s cool river on a midsummer day. Obito felt his lips curl into a bitter smile as he took it off its chain and, without any hesitation at all, slipped it onto his finger.

 

The world tilted, he fell to the earth screaming and clawing at the dirt, distantly noting blood running down from his eye as the world suddenly seemed clearer than it had ever been before, even with the sharingan. Chakra spread upwards from his hand like fire, pushing his blood backwards towards his heart, tearing at his mindscape and reforming it into something foreign, while all the memories he’d repressed seemed to burst out of him.

 

(Suddenly, he didn’t feel like Uchiha Obito anymore, not even the Obito who had walked out of the cave.)

 

It was like earning himself the sharingan again, everything panic, rage, desperation, and despair as his body tried and failed to reach forward for that one thing that might save him, save Rin (and that still hadn’t been good enough, had it Obito? After all those years you have the sharingan and it was worth nothing!)

 

Above him, like a horrific sun, he could feel the heat of Sauron’s eye from the east drawing ever closer while he clawed at the earth. In his head, Obito could hear him laughing, clearer than ever before.

 

“No,” he said, forcing himself to stand upwards, wiping the blood from his face as he looked back towards the west, turning his own back on Sauron’s all-seeing eye, “No, you will not win this.”

 

He took out a kunai from a pouch at his waist, trying to ignore the way his skin almost seemed to glow, a pure and furious white, and poured chakra into it. Looking out towards the horizon he could almost see as distance compressed itself, until he could see Lee and the dragon, Lee and the army, as if he was standing right there beside her.

 

The dragon and the ring wraith looked towards him, shrieking, but he paid them no mind as with a flick of his wrist he sent the kunai, now a bright and burning star, towards them. When it hit there was a great terrible cry, echoing for miles and miles, and in a burst of blinding light the nazgûl and the dragon were banished to the halls of Mandos with all the other dead.

 

Another kunai, with the same indifference, was sent flying out towards the raiding party of Uruk-hai sent to collect the pair of them as well as the ring and then they too were only dust. With that he stepped through space and time until he was standing across from lee herself, looking somewhat dazed at the lack of carnage around her.

 

She caught sight of him, eyes widening, and reflected in her pupils was something blindingly white, “Obito.”

 

He reached out with the hand that war the ring, brushed away some of her hair as well as dark blood of orcs that had splattered onto her face. He opened his mouth to say something, a strange mix of his own language and something lyrical and foreign that didn’t belong to Uchiha Obito at all, but then closed it as his hand fell away.

 

“Obito, what did you do?” she breathed, reaching out towards him with hands that, while still pale, seemed somehow darker than his own currently were.

 

The words came out in Sindarin, “ _I decided that I could not allow him to even think that he had won._ ”

 

He blinked, paused for a moment, because his voice didn’t sound right. It was too clear, too calm and confident, when only this morning it had felt raw and…

 

“Obito,” Lee repeated, eyes lowering to his finger where the ring now rested, the seal, the promise, to be one ring above all other rings, engraved in fire on its surface, “Obito, you can’t…”

 

He drew back, clutching at his hand, suddenly all too well aware of what she was about to say and not about to let her say it, “I won’t let you take it! It’s mine, I found it, I carried it here, and you can’t have it, shishou!”

 

She just stared at him, saying nothing as he stepped backwards, hissing and raving, “You think I would make it that easy, shishou?! That I would just hand it over when I…”

 

“No,” she said, putting her hands into her pockets so casually, as if they were simply standing in Konoha discussing Obito’s hopeless love life, the weather, or anything in between, “I don’t expect you to do anything.”

He felt something in him dim for a moment, something at a loss as he tried to ask, “You…”

But the words escaped him as he watched her look past him, out towards the great empty fields, “I can’t tell you what to do, Obito, and I won’t force you to take it off or give it up. I can’t even tell it to let you go. These are… These are things you must decide for yourself, I can’t make these choices, any real choice, for either of you. I just have to have… faith, faith in you, and that you’ll live up to more than my expectations. Just like you always have.”

 

Finally, she looked back at him, and for a moment it was clear that whatever he looked like now he looked the same to her as he had when she’d first found him in Madara’s cave, or even before the Kannabi bridge mission. As if, looking at him, she had always seen his soul, his fëa, rather than his scarred exterior.

 

His paranoia, somehow, even beneath the burning sun of Sauron’s eye or the fire consuming his soul, melted from him. He knew that though everyone else might kill him for what he had on his finger, though everyone else would take it from him, somehow Lee, against all expectations, never would.

 

(It had been right, he thought, there was barely a shadow of Rin inside his head anymore. How could there be, he asked himself, when Lee stubbornly insisted on burning so brightly?)

 

He held up his hand, looked down at the golden band, oddly colorful against his pale skin, and looked back up at Lee. Something in him balked, asked him if he was sure he wanted to do this, if he even could do this, but Obito paid it no mind as, slowly but surely, he slipped the ring from his finger.

 

Sauron’s eye blinked out, the world restored itself, and he breathed out as, with eyes closed, he placed it in Lee’s outstretched hands.

 

Then, Lee’s voice, amused and almost chiding as she noted, “Obito, I thought I warned you to hold onto your pants.”

 

It took him a moment to place it, his eyes flying open, and then he remembered a conversation in a bar at the start of this whole adventure, about a seductive genjutsu master midgit.

 

“Goddammit, shishou!”


	10. Chapter 10

_Part Ten: Obito reaps some of the consequences of his actions and a council of sorts is held between Lee, Obito, and the ring itself to decide its fate._

 

* * *

 

When Obito opened his eyes, it was with an odd surreal calm the kind of calm that had him suspect that he was dreaming. He was staring up at the ceiling of a cave. No, not a cave, the cave. He knew each jagged rock and corner intimately, months and months of staring up at it having engraved the image into his memory even without the sharingan.

 

However, there was no rustling or chattering of Zetsus, white or black, or any hint of Madara’s miasma of killing intent. The only sound was Obito’s own breathing, steady and in time, in and out again, as well as a soft, warm, crackling as if from a fire.

 

Obito stood, righted himself, and looked deeper into the heart of the cave. It was glowing, pulsing with heat and light as if a heart made of fire was stored somewhere deep in the depths. Obito, barefoot, found himself walking over the oddly smooth stone of the cave towards it.

 

And as he did so Sauron’s song echoed along with the clanging of a hammer against steel, “ _Ash nazg durbatulúk, ash nazg gimbatul. Ash nazg thrakatulúk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul._ ”

 

Except now, somehow, Obito knew their meaning despite having every reason not to, “One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them. One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.”

 

On saying the words he found himself standing over the edge of the heart of his dream, the crater of Mount Doom inside the depths of Mordor, where unseen and unknown by the elves of the second age, Sauron crafted the one ring of power which would spell the end of an age.

 

Sauron in the gilded elven disguise of Annatar, holding the ring aloft, then turned his head towards Obito so those pale eyes could meet his. A smile, slow and curving on his face, and then a proclamation, “You are a fool, Uchiha Obito, who does not even know when he is already damned.”

 

And then Obito woke up.

 

Unfortunately, taking a stuttering breath and returning to the land of the living he realized a few rather awkward things almost immediately.

 

The first was that he had fallen asleep during his watch. Perhaps to be expected given that he hadn’t slept at all the night before and that putting on the ring and taking it off again was, well…

 

He was basically back down to being just shy of chakra exhaustion.

 

It was more than that though. The ring had… Obito didn’t exactly know but he still didn’t feel quite right. For one thing, his eye, the sharingan eye still felt… Different. It was more draining than it’d been before, sharper vision, and there was just the odd feeling of more chakra there than there had even been this morning.

 

Lee had written it off at the time by just patting him on the shoulder, almost consolingly as they’d slowly started their way down the road south again, and saying rather awkwardly, “Well, Obito, we should probably talk about that later. You know, when we’re not surrounded by the corpses of slaughtered demons and nin dragons.”

 

Obito couldn’t help but blithely point out that it was the metaphorical corpses of the Uruk-hai and nazgûl as they were now little more than shadows, light, and dust but he’d gotten the point even if the prospect of walking was suddenly daunting.

 

She’d also, with a rather odd look on her face, as she slung a supporting arm around his shoulders, asked him if he was feeling particularly mad with grief at the moment.

 

Which, mostly he just felt tired, and kind of itchy. Like his own chakra was restless in his skin and was even now nagging at it in an attempt to reshape it into something more suitable. Suitable for what he didn’t really know, bearing the ring he supposed, but either way it just left him feeling vaguely uncomfortable as they kept walking along.

 

Uncomfortable, and, if he pushed past the sheer exhaustion and discomfort, unnerved and alarmed. It was reminiscent to how he’d felt when he’d first woke up in the cave. He hadn’t been able to see himself, see his own reflection for months until he was back in Konoha. But he’d known even then, beyond waking up from injuries that should have killed him, that something was very wrong and different and Obito wasn’t the same Obito he used to be. Except this might be worse, back then he’d felt the scars, been able to stare down at the patchwork that was his body and could imagine his face looked similar enough. He hadn’t liked the idea of it, it had left him with a dull and sort of aching horror that he had bitterly tried to suppress while he hoped in vain for escape or rescue, but at least he’d had some idea.

 

This time there hadn’t been a cave in, there’d been no waking up with Madara explaining the remains of Senju Hashirama injected into his skin, but there was that similar feeling that putting on a ring of power was akin to having half your body crushed under a mountain. Like you couldn’t put that thing on and come out even looking the way you had a second before. And, if you did look the same, it just meant something more insidious beneath the surface of your skin was spreading roots.

 

That combined with the fact that he still found himself wanting the ring like he’d never wanted anything in his life, had had him volunteering for first watch as soon as they’d set up camp.

 

He’d been all but certain that it was going to be another long and sleepless night of wanting but not daring to touch, at watching it glitter in the firelight dangling from the chain from Lee’s neck, listening to it whisper in his ear…

 

At some point though exhaustion must have won, and Obito could only thank god for Lee’s ridiculous seal work that had probably kept the orcs and god only knew what else away from their small camp just off the well-worn trail.

 

However, that wasn’t the really embarrassing and awkward part. No, Obito could have lived with falling asleep. Granted, Lee might have given him some minor amount of deserved hell, but he could have survived it.

 

No, the part that made Obito want to crawl into a hole and die was the fact that sleeping Obito must have decided it was a grand idea to snuggle up behind the sleeping Lee-shishou, get as close as physically possible to her so that he could feel every single inch of her body, and then reach over her to not only put his hand in the perfect position to fondle her breasts but in an even better position to fondle the one ring of power.

 

Which he was, currently doing that is, unconsciously twisting the ring of power between his calloused fingertips.

 

And he was somewhere between enticed and on the verge of being truly aroused, by a piece of metal conveniently accompanied by a woman. Worse, said woman was very clearly awake as well, but was staring silently forward at the wall as if it could somehow inform her what the hell was happening.

 

This was the bullshit Obito woke up to.

 

Well, there were two things to do, Obito thought. First, he could fling himself to the other side of the cave, roll around to face the other wall, and pretend that none of this had happened. The other was to play it cool, pretend he wasn’t doing what he was doing, and it was all in Lee’s head and that Obito was perfectly fine.

 

And that no, he wasn’t having some sort of sexual crisis where he realized that he was feeling more interest for a piece of jewelry and his own shishou than he ever had Rin. That Rin, as the ring had warned, seemed to be slipping further and further away from him in the present moment.

 

And he certainly was not consumed by the thought that the idea of ring of power plus Lee-shishou in the same context was somehow even more enticing, a thought that in the theater of Uchiha Obito’s mind seemed somehow on par with any Icha Icha novel despite the absurd reality that it starred a piece of jewelry and his own master.

 

Clearly that thing had just dragged his mind through a gutter and left it there to rot, and that he’d better stop thinking that sort of thing now unless he wanted this to get even more awkward than it already was. Though, he supposed on the bright side, that this was somehow less embarrassing when the ring of power had been a hobbit.

 

Unfortunately, Obito’s paralyzing indecision cost him, as Lee spoke first, “Obito.”

 

Obito at first said nothing, found himself stiffening as he tried and failed to force himself to let go of the ring and back away. It was… a more difficult thing than you’d think, even more so than the first time he’d given it to her. That had somehow seemed different. All the same, there was a part of him that knew he could let it go again, if she asked and he knew that it was going straight into her hands, but there was also a part of him that just refused to see the need to do so. If it wasn’t on his finger, the eye of Sauron wasn’t burning down on them like a second baleful sun, and they weren’t about to be shanked by orcs it was unbelievably difficult to tell his fingers to let the thing go. As a result, Obito’s fingers tightened around its surface.

 

Slowly, arms tightening around Lee and in turn the ring, he found himself deciding to play it cool as best he could and calmly responded, “Yes?”

 

For a moment there was silence, no doubt Lee wondering if she was really the one who was going to have to address this situation and what someone even was supposed to say to their sixteen-year-old ring addict apprentice groping master plus ring in sleep.

 

Obito, meanwhile, wondered how his life had managed to get himself into this situation. This hadn’t seemed like the sort of thing that could possibly happen to him when he was a bright eyed and bushy tailed genin shouting about becoming hokage. Still, at some point from starting from Point A to ending here at Point B Obito must have made some ghastly mistake that enabled this whole dumpster fire to come together. At this point he might as well throw out the classic Bakashism that he’d somehow managed to get lost on the road of life.

 

Simultaneously, he also found himself thanking the gods that Minato-sensei or Kakashi weren’t here to see this. They would kill him, they would kill him first by themselves, resurrect him, and then kill him together. They could never, ever, hear about any of this.

 

Lee slowly rolled over so that she was looking directly at him, considering him with that cool and unnerving green gaze while Obito tried to nervously smile back. Finally, as Lee moved he forced himself to allow the ring to slip through his fingers so that it could dangle enticingly in front of him.

 

Laughing at him, Obito was somehow utterly certain, as even in the world where he did not take the orange mask it was inevitable Uchiha Obito would play the fool.

 

Finally, after far too long of a silence, Lee decided to skip past the awkwardness entirely and instead cut straight to the heart of the matter, “I think, Obito, that we should probably take a look at whatever the hell is going on in your head right now.”

 

Obito blinked, blinked again, flushed and rubbed the back of his head in embarrassment not sure if he was relieved or just confused at being let off the hook, “Oh, yes, right um… What?”

 

(Or even, an unnervingly large part of him, somehow disappointed as if he’d wanted something more to come of this.)

 

Lee heaved herself up into a fully upright position with a sigh, cracking her neck in a circular motion, then motioned to the ring dangling from her neck, “Whoever this is, he’s managed to mess you up enough to somehow get you the mangekyo sharingan without any dead people.”  


“The what?” Obito stammered, now sitting fully upright as he clutched at his eye in near panic, “It gave me the what now?!”

 

That was… That was not something you just got. Well, Uchiha Mikoto supposedly stumbled across it in what had to be the clan mystery of the ages, but Obito had come to suspect that had something to do with Lee herself versus strange happenstance. The point was though, that you didn’t just get it, it couldn’t be cheated, and you were not supposed to be able to get it just by slipping a ring on your finger.

 

“And that’s not even getting to your hair,” Lee continued, ignoring Obito’s slight panic attack at the idea of now having the most evolved form of his clan’s dojutsu (and god they were going to kill him now, weren’t they? They’d been pissed enough at the sharingan and his giving the sharingan to Kakashi, his now earning the mangekyo on top of that would have them rioting in the streets.)

 

“What’s wrong with my hair?” Obito asked, now wishing that he’d grown it out long enough to be able see some of it. As it was he was just kind of patting it and it felt the same as ever, that coarse thick Uchiha hair that perpetually either curled or stood on end, but apparently it was not looking par for the course.

 

“Not to mention the spurts of fluent _Sindarin_ and sudden increase in vocabulary, the erratic behavior, and the fact that I’m sure he’s made himself right at home in your mindscape while I wasn’t looking. That, and it would be kind of nice to talk face to face and get at least some idea of what this bastard wants before we decide what to do…” Lee shrugged again, sighed, and said, “I suppose there’s just no helping it.”

 

“Helping what?” Obito asked, now feeling more than a little wary as Lee’s casual resignation turned into serious contemplation regarding her apprentice.

 

“You remember _legillimency_?” she asked, and he nodded slowly, remembering that it was an English technique of what was more or less a replication of some of the Yamanaka clan techniques.

 

Naturally when the Yamanaka had heard of it they’d thrown a miniature fit as well as had something of an existential crisis. Luckily for them mastery took years, it and the opposing branch of occlumency could not be attempted or mastered by anyone, and since it was English only a select number of shinobi had even heard of it.

 

Obito himself had never seen it in action, had merely heard offhand who happened to be proficient or else excellent in which and made it a point to generally avoid eye contact. Which, as an Uchiha felt a little strange as usually it was the other way around and only great uninformed fools or the suicidally brave made direct eye-contact with the sharingan.

 

“I happen to be something of a natural,” Lee said, motioning to herself with a rather wry smile before adding, “That said, I’m pants at occlumency, so I would kindly advise you not to wander off the beaten path, so to speak, as you’ll likely end up in my head instead which… Well… I’ve been told it’s an interesting place.”

 

Obito somehow thought that was an understatement.

 

“And it may get… Uncomfortable,” Lee finally settled on after a moment, shooting him a winning smile, “We’re likely going to have to go very deep into your head and pass through all sorts of nasty things.”

 

“Oh,” Obito said slowly, not quite sure what else he could possibly say to that, except maybe to wonder out loud if he had the option of skipping past all this. Judging by the determined expression on her face, he didn’t.

 

“Right,” She scooted closer to him so that their knees were touching, the ring dangling between them as she lined her eyes directly up with him, “Are you ready?”

 

Swallowing rather nervously at the close proximity, feeling his heart pounding in his chest, he was sure that “No” was not the right answer. So, all he did was give a fraction of a nod, forced his eyes away from the ring and instead to meet hers.

 

And it was like falling into them. He couldn’t feel himself moving forward and yet it was like he did, kept moving closer and closer until he was falling through her eyes as if jumping into strange green pools.

 

Only, at the bottom as he floated down were not the deep forests of Konoha or else the green foothills of mountains, but instead the forests just outside of that great bridge in Kusagakure, Iwa’s supply line in the third war and the beginning of the end of Uchiha Obito as he had once been.

 

Here it was as strong and sturdy as ever before its destruction, the act of which Obito hadn’t seen for himself, as somewhere in the mountains he had already been presumed dead. Dead by all except, perhaps, Hatake Kakashi who in turn would manage to convince only Eru Lee to come and find him months after the fact.

 

Looking back over his shoulder, away from the bridge, Obito could make out Konohagakure painted in a strange rose-gold tint that gave it a surreal almost glittering effect. There, though he was much too far to be able to see these details, he could somehow see the drifting of cherry blossoms in the Spring, the light reflecting off the river, and the sound of distant laughter as well as his own proud insistence that he would one day become hokage.

 

Lee’s voice sounded beside him, right next to his ear, “That must be your childhood.”

 

Obito, turned, whirled and caught her standing next to him. She was dressed as she normally was when on a mission, dark drab colors, the flak jacket and chunin vest, but she somehow looked more ethereal here. Like she was a being made of light and air rather than flesh and bone, the dark circles, the dirt on her skin, all that evidence of the physical world and a mortal body scrubbed away from her in this place.

 

Lee looking out with him, her eyes reflecting the golden Konoha, continued, “It’s where you’ve sorted everything before the Kannabi bridge.”

 

Obito supposed that made sense, he’d often though his mind would be cleanly divided into a before and after, and perhaps even into those memories he’d prefer to think about and those ones that he wouldn’t with the Kannabi bridge linking the two. It would make sense that his own mindscape would reflect that.

 

“I suspect that we’ll have to cross the bridge if we want to meet our friend,” Lee said, turning Obito to face the bridge and the more imposing path shrouded by the woods on its other side.

 

“Of course we will,” he said, more to himself than to her, and even in his own mind and memories it took a firm steeling of will to be able to take the slow steps forward towards it and then, finally, to step on its stone surface.

 

It was longer inside of his head than it had been at the time. Granted, it had been long, spanning the great dried out river, but this seemed to go on for miles and miles as the shadows around them grew darker and more menacing with each step. The leaves, as they rustled, no longer comforted him but instead reminded him of men made from leaves inside of a cave.

 

Or, rather, men who were once turned into leaves.

 

Lee’s voice cut into the silence like a hot knife through a stick of butter, “So, Obito, I know until now we’ve been heading south east, if only to avoid more ungodly foot soldiers but there remains a decision to be made.”

 

“A decision?” Obito asked distractedly, a part of him grateful for Lee taking his mind off of exactly what he was doing and a part of him too distant to listen. It occurred to him that they weren’t just walking across the Kannabi bridge, they were walking across the bridge into all of those things that Obito never wanted to think about.

 

Everything he’d ever suppressed, everything he’d shut out and pushed down into the darkest corners of his soul, everything would be on the other side of this bridge and his only solace was that he at least had Eru Lee as a guide.

 

“Do we return to Mordor with the ring or not?”

 

Obito forced his eyes away from the other side to look at her, to recognize her question, and to supply the almost instinctual answer of, “Of course we don’t.”

 

Suddenly he found it easy to set aside where they were going and what they were doing, his voice rising and with it very recent memories of being ambushed on the road flooding through the crevasse beneath them, “Shishou, he couldn’t even wait until we got back to even stab us in the back. He not only took the first opportunity, he took the first opportunity with utter glee by assaulting us with the nazgûl. You know if we return through the black gates the first thing he’s going to do is dispose of us, if not something far worse and more permanent than that. Giving him the ring is stupid, more than that, he simply doesn’t deserve it.”

 

That, really, was the crux of the matter for Obito. Yes, there was the pragmatic sense of danger and recovering from being betrayed by a foreign king. More than that though, he was insulted and that idea kept running through his head that since Sauron wanted the ring so badly he should be the last person on Middle Earth to get it.

 

“Were they sent by him?” Lee mused and Obito found himself balking.

 

“Of course, they were! Who else has command of the nazgûl?!” Obito asked, granted he couldn’t speak for the Uruk-hai, especially as those had come from the west rather than the east but given that he’d sent the goddamn ring wraiths Obito doubted Sauron would have been displeased by that turn of events.

 

“Well, I don’t know,” Lee said, and there was something very pointed in her expression as she looked at him, “I didn’t even know that you knew they were called the _nazgûl_.”

 

Obito stopped on the bridge, looked out not at either shore but instead out into the great crevasse of his memory. Finally, distantly, he noted, “I… must have heard him say it somewhere.”  


And he had, now that he thought about it, it had always been him and Lee who had referred to them by their clear function as hunter nin. Sauron had always referred to them as the _nazgûl_ , the ring wraiths, he had just never made it explicitly clear that it was only the ring they hunted. There were no nuke nin from Barad-dûr.

 

Slowly, he began walking again, recovering his initial thoughts and his initial arguments, “Either way, shihou, even if he somehow wasn’t aware or responsible (which I can guarantee you he was), you have to agree that we should at least gather some solid intelligence before we even think of approaching the black gates.”

 

Lee still considered him, not seeming to be listening to him at all but rather staring past that, but then she nodded and said, “Fair enough, and we’re making a good start on that meeting this thing face to face. All the same, what do you think we should do with it?”

 

Do with it?

 

Obito supposed he hadn’t thought that far ahead. He’d been caught on the idea of giving it to Sauron being terrible but doing something with it…

 

It was with a slow and terrible dread that Obito realized he had had every intention of taking it back to Konoha. There’d been no question of giving it to someone else here, to even loaning it to someone other than Eru Lee, inside his mind it had been a done deal that of course he would return to Konoha with the ring on his finger.

 

Even as he realized that this was…

 

If there was something that could destroy Konoha just as easily as a bijuu, simply by existing, then it was this.

 

And yet even with that, even with that almost certain knowledge that to bring back the ring was to realize his worst fears, he was still more than tempted. As if he could simply keep it on a box on the mantelpiece, only taking it out to look at it every once in a while, perhaps on the odd occasion slipping it on his finger…

 

Closing his eyes even as he continued to walk, he forced himself to say, “I don’t know.”

 

With that, suddenly, he found himself on the other end of the bridge. He looked down at the ground, somehow bleaker and colorless compared to the golden other side. Looking back over the bridge, Konoha was no longer visible. The only thing he could see being the tree line and the path back into childhood.

 

And ahead, the imposing walls of the Uchiha clan compound as seen from the outside, and of course, above their heads, the rocky path to Madara’s cavern. Only this time, as in his dream, the entrance wasn’t dark but was instead emitting a soft and dangerous glow.

 

Something made of shadow and fire dreaming within it.

 

“That looks very promising,” Lee said, clapping her hands together and rubbing them.

 

“If by promising you mean ominous, then I agree,” Obito could only add weakly, once again wondering if it wasn’t too late to turn back now and say they’d given it a good solid effort.

 

Lee strode in front of him, entirely too confident given that it was Obito’s goddamn head she was walking in, while Obito trailed reluctantly behind as he braced himself to not only see all his favorite Zetsus again but Madara himself as well.

 

He felt his breath growing louder and more labored, pressure on his chest from the weights that had almost always been on top of it as Madara waited for him to comply with the eye of the moon plan, his fingers began to tingle and go numb from cold even as the air became unbearably warm as they entered.

 

Madara wasn’t there, neither was Black Zetsu, White Zetsu, or any other variety of Zetsu. Instead it was empty of all signs of life, even the grotesque black statue from the outerpath gone, and in its place further into the cave there was the fire bred from corruption.

 

“Are we sure we want to do this?” Obito found himself asking, his voice oddly rough as it caught inside of his throat.

 

“Well, there’s no time like the present,” Lee said, perhaps a tad too blasé. Even so she reached backward and grabbed his scarred hand in hers, squeezed it for reassurance, and slowly lead him down into the heart of shadow and fire.

 

Except, when the reached that central chamber, it was not the great fiery shadow that Obito had expected, the remains of a corrupted maia, but instead an oddly familiar ethereal figure. He was… Familiar was a strange way to put it, Obito thought, because while clearly from Middle Earth he didn’t necessarily look like anyone Obito knew.

 

Everything about him was golden and silver, as if he was made not only of light but of precious metals shaped into the form of a man with his eyes glittering pale blue jewels. There was an odd, almost shimmering, beauty to him like the way that sunlight across the surface of water was beautiful. Something that tantalized and caught the eye, drew in, but could never be held directly in one’s hand.

 

He was, in his own strange way, more beautiful than even the fair form of Sauron.

 

Except, something in that thought had him stopping, had Obito looking over the features once again and eventually landing on those odd eyes and the way his lips curved into a smile. Obito felt himself pale, his dread as well as his awe and desire slipping away from him to be replaced by profound irritation and dull rage as he cried out, “Oh, you gauche son of a bitch!”

 

Sauron, lord of Mordor and shadow of the wasteland, now making a bachelor pad of evil in Obito’s brain, looked ever so slightly taken aback as he asked in a lyrical and almost painfully beautiful voice, “Pardon?”

 

Obito however was just shaking his head, gripping the bridge of his nose and trying to tell himself to remain calm, that flipping over the furniture that didn’t exist in his head as he threw a temper tantrum would get him nowhere, “Why am I not surprised? Shishou, tell me why I’m not surprised.”

 

“I don’t know, Obito, I’m a little surprised. After all that fire and brimstone, I expected something that didn’t look like it belonged in an English boy band,” Lee said, evidently not recognizing this stray piece of Sauron’s overwhelming chakra as she tilted her head slightly to the side.

 

Sauron’s smile disappeared as he realized that they were not falling in worship of his latest and greatest extreme makeover, “Belong in a what?”

 

“No, shishou, we know who this is,” Obito then motioned towards Sauron’s misplaced chakra in a mocking introduction, “Shishou, meet Sauron’s other half. Sauron’s stray _fëa_ bound to the one ring, meet Lee Eru.”

 

“His other half?” Lee asked, now looking him once over and appearing to actually look beyond the physical appearance to the chakra itself, “Well, I suppose now that you mention it there is something kind of familiar… Except, why would he put this much of his own chakra into a ring? And why is he so blonde?”

 

Sauron opened his mouth to answer but Obito cut him off before he could even start, crossing his arms in irritation as he was forced to witness what looked like Sauron’s latest and greatest overdramatic disaster taking place in his own brain, “Well, isn’t that the _English_ nin’s shtick? Putting chakra in things he likes?”

 

And why did that now sound twice as awful given that Sauron had apparently stuck his chakra straight into Obito’s head.

 

Lee just haplessly shrugged, not even looking as Sauron opened his mouth to again cut in as she said, “Sure, but he does that to avoid dying, or at least, that was the idea I got. As far as I understood Sauron already just naturally avoids death. So, I don’t see what storing large amounts of chakra into inanimate objects could possibly get him.”

 

“Are we really asking for logic in the actions of a man who tried to bang us collectively while possessing a _hobbit_?” Obito asked, eyebrows rising past the point where he thought they could go. Still, it needed to be said that this whole disaster had started in a pub in Bree.

 

Even if the ring, Sauron’s stray chakra, looked as if it was choking at the very idea of what Obito had just suggested.

 

“What’s a _hobbit_?”

 

“Shire Baggins,” Obito said dismissively with a wave of one hand, “Short, harry feet, from the middle of absolutely nowhere and generally are known for doing absolutely nothing important with their lives and liking it that way.”

 

Now, Obito was beginning to suspect that this information was something that had managed to leak over from the ring’s chakra, but he wasn’t going to spend too much time digging into that now.

 

“Well, that is a very good point,” Lee said rather dully before hesitating and adding, “Still, he seems to have some trappings of logic sometimes even if he does like to turn into a fiery eyeball of rage, sing the lyrics of the worst song over and over again, and try to get back the chunk of his own chakra that he threw into jewelery… I just haven’t figured out what it is yet.”

 

 

“Keep trying, shishou,” Obito said with bitter sarcasm, “I’m sure you’ll come up with something real soon.”

 

“Excuse me,” the ring, Sauron’s other half, finally interrupted looking rather strained, his expression eerily reminiscent of his dark-haired twin in Mordor when Lee had finally started speaking a decent amount of Sindarin, “Was there something you wanted from me?”  


Both Lee and Obito turned in tandem to stare at the man. Obito wished he could say that he had seen more than enough of the man or something equally witty, but as it was his tongue felt dry, and despite everything he still felt himself drawn in. As if knowing the man’s real face, his true purpose, helped nothing.

 

Lee, however, didn’t seem conflicted at all as she walked forward towards the man, then stared down at his feet, “Well, sort of, I mostly came to see how deep you’d managed to get your roots into my apprentice.”

 

Looking down Obito then noticed that there were roots of a kind, strange rivers of light emanating from the man’s feet, sinking down into the floor of the cavern and deeper into Obito’s mind.

 

“And you have really done a number on him,” Lee said to herself with a frown, reaching out and caressing one of the roots, “Which is more or less what I thought…”

 

“Shishou?”

 

“Well, Obito, the prognosis is not good,” Lee said as she stood with a sigh, walked away from Sauron and back to Obito as her face became somber, “You’re stuck with at least some of him your head for… Until I think of something really spectacular.”

 

“You seem to be under some misapprehension,” the ring stated, ignoring how Lee tilted her head back towards him to glare side-eyed at him, “I am the trace of _fëa_ that remains from the smith Annatar who created…”

 

“That’s nice,” Lee interjected before he could finish, “But unfortunately neither Obito nor I have the context to appreciate whatever ridiculous story you want to feed us. Annatar, Sauron, whatever you call yourself makes no difference to us. The song remains the same, my friend.”

 

 Lee then with a wave of her hand, released golden chains out from her palm, throwing Sauron’s golden alter ego against the wall and sealing him there in a casual display of impressive power, “For now, we can at least make sure you don’t touch anything important.”

 

At once Obito felt lighter somehow, as if he’d been carrying around a great weight without realizing it. Still though, Obito thought as his eyes moved over the ring pinned to the wall, this meant that he was only sealed here, not that he was gone entirely.

 

Lee then, with yet another sigh, plopped down on the ground and stared up idly at Sauron with a tilted head, watching as he struggled with growing panic against the chains, “Now, the real question is, what on earth are we going to do about you?”

 

“Do about him?” Obito asked as he decided, that since it was his own goddamn head and he could do what he wanted, to sit down beside her, “What do you mean do about him?”

 

“On the one hand, Obito, this is a man’s soul we’re looking at,” Lee said, and here as many times before she seemed to be seeing something Obito simply couldn’t as she stared across at the maia avatar of the ring inside of Obito’s mind, “However distasteful, overdramatic, and prone to betrayal he is I can understand why he’d so desperately want it back. To the point of even acting out so flagrantly against us. This sort of existence is not something I would force on anyone, even Danzo.”

 

Sauron stopped struggling at that, seemed rather shocked, looking down at Lee with wide and uncomprehending eyes as she looked up at him. For a moment Obito wondered if anyone had seen him for what he was other than her, whatever flame he was beneath the genjutsu and the glamours.

 

“Shishou, you can’t be…”

 

“On the other hand,” Lee said, ignoring Obito’s interjection, “He is in default and at the very least hardly deserves to be rewarded for staging us in the back with his deplorable hunter nin. That, and I just have this feeling that giving it back would have… unintended consequences.”

 

Unintended consequences, Obito was somehow utterly certain, including attempting to bind Lee and Obito into his service for all eternity.

 

Lee then closed her eyes, gave a small hum of thought, then tilted her head towards the chained ring, “I suppose you don’t have any thoughts on where you’d like to end up?”

 

The ring was silent for a moment, gawking unnaturally down at Lee, looking as if he was torn between asking if she was serious or asking if she was even a person. Finally, he said in that rather wry tone that Obito had come to expect from Sauron in the brief weeks they’d known him, “If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer the former.”

 

Obito snorted, looking away from the ring as he tried to maintain his presence of mind, even with it chained beneath Lee’s seals there was that sense of underlying temptation and want.

 

“Yes, well, we’re not going to do that one because we’re not that stupid,” Lee said, then held up her hands before the man could protest, “If you’d just kept your hands to yourself, and your other half laid off sending in the hunter nin and the footmen soldiers, then we wouldn’t even be having this conversation and you’d already be back in Mordor no questions asked. So, I’m afraid you really only have yourself to blame for this one.”

 

“If I kept my hands to myself?!” he asked, lunging forward against his chains, straining them ever so slightly, but not enough to rattle them or even buckle their hold against him.

 

“You know, I could just dump you in the ocean and be done with it,” Lee noted, “So I think I’m being rather accommodating. That said, with that option off the table, is there anywhere else you’d prefer to go?”

 

The ring sneered, face twisting from something pleasant into something both beautiful and profane, “You think it would be that easy?”

 

He looked down at the pair of them, eyes unhesitantly moving towards Obito, “Do you think he has the will to simply let it go, just like that? Do you know just how difficult it was for him to give the ring even to you? A woman who he trusts beyond all comprehension? Do you imagine he can simply hand it over to another?”

 

For a moment Lee said nothing, neither refuting nor agreeing with the ring’s words. Obito himself was silent as well, knowing that even if he wanted to, he couldn’t agree or disagree with them either. Hadn’t he thought as much earlier, that it might very well be impossible to simply leave it behind?

 

Finally, slowly, Lee said, “I imagine it’s in your best interests if he does not hold onto it.”

 

Lee ignored the curling of the man’s lips, the amused smile, as she said, “Obito has the… potential for great and terrible power. Pumping foreign chakra into him, skewing his perception and morality… I have great faith in him but just the same I think you’d find yourself moving steadily towards a goal you had no intention of reaching.”

 

The ring asked, again seeming almost amused if anything else, “What is that supposed to mean?”

 

Lee, however, responded quite plainly and without any hesitation, “It means that the path of Uchiha Obito’s annihilation does not lead to Mordor.”

 

She stood then, helped Obito up to his feet as well and ignored the ring’s baleful glare. It could just be Obito, his odd mood and the fact that there was a bucket load of foreign chakra now taking residence in his head, but he found himself oddly touch that it was once again Lee who would lead him out of a cave like this.

 

Her hand, he thought, was always so much warmer than he expected.

 

With a smile towards Obito she said, “Well, I suppose there’s nothing for it. We’re just going to have to put it back where we found it.”

 

“Where we found it?” Obito asked, wondering if he’d missed part of the conversation or he was actually supposed to understand what that meant.

 

Sauron though, seemed to understand at the very least, and incredibly amused and dubious as he said, “Oh, you can’t be serious.”

 

He then threw his head back against the wall, laughing hysterically even as Lee said, “Obviously, we’re giving it back to Shire Baggins and company.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to GlassGirlCeci on fanfiction for betaing the chapter.

_Part Eleven: Lee and Obito go searching for hobbits and fail to find them, Obito experiences a paradigm shift, and things slide downhill at a rather alarmingly quick rate._

* * *

 

"Why isn't it the cave?"

They were the first words out of his mouth, without any introduction or context, but they were true nonetheless. Obito wasn't in Madara's cave, he wasn't even in the depths of Mount Doom at Sauron's hidden forge. Obito, as he looked around, in fact had no idea where he was.

He suspected, as he sat up and glanced around himself, that he wasn't in a true place at all. Or, at the very least, not in a place that he himself had ever seen. He was on a grassy hill, foothills of mountains stretching out in a circle around him. The hill was covered in wildflowers, bluebells, dandelions, poppies, and a plethora of tiger lilies; odd, because he hadn't thought lilies grew untamed so easily.

A warm breeze made its way through, gently swaying the grass, the heads of the flowers, and ruffling through Obito's hair in an almost soothing manner.

"Oh," Obito said slowly as it dawned on him, "I'm dreaming again."

It wasn't a particularly alarming revelation, he thought, in fact oddly nice, as too often when he was sleeping the cave would linger in his head. The cave or the constant dull throb of heartache over Rin, though it had been a long time since he'd dreamed of the wedding he and Rin wouldn't have.

This field of flowers, it was… nice, and oddly familiar for all that he was certain he had never been here before.

It was reminiscent, in a way Obito really couldn't put his finger on, of Lee's small apartment. He'd always thought Lee's apartment was a rather bare and lonely place, certainly when he'd first walked in there after being shanghaied to be her apprentice. Most of her real items of worth or sentiment had been left over at the Hatake compound, so other than the stray books, DVDs, and furniture, it never had much of a personal touch. Still, the place had over time filled with so many memories, enough that Obito could hardly recall finding the place off-putting.

Yes, there was something in this place, the small glow of warmth, that was a bit like Lee's apartment.

"Tell me about her."

He looked back. There, sitting on the hill just behind him, was an oddly beautiful man with hair so blonde it was almost silver in color. His eyes were bright and blue like stars, skin almost glowing in the dark, and his smile was as kind as Rin's without any of the accompanying stabs of bitterness and shame that always ate at Obito's heart for daring to want more from her. The man's hands and feet, though, were chained together with thick golden links, bound so tightly the metal was almost cutting into his skin. He did not complain though, did not even seem to notice, as he instead stared across at Obito.

Staring at him, Obito placed him as someone who he knew, though not intimately, and in the waking world would not trust. However, this was a dream, and whatever wariness or memories there were had been washed away and left behind a pleasant sort of camaraderie. That, and the subtle, slow-burning embers of desire that Obito could not fully explain to himself.

Except, Obito frowned at the man as he said, "I've never wanted anyone except Rin."

The man's eyebrows rose, amusement and perhaps a hint of exasperation in his expression as he looked across at Obito. "You did not build this field for Rin, Obito."

Obito looked out at the scenery, the field, and felt it shift into Lee's apartment with the realization. Suddenly, the hill he was sitting on morphed into her couch, the scenery into the view of her television with the DVD of "Predator" loaded into the tray. Somewhere, in the kitchen, there was undoubtedly a kettle of tea placed on the stove and Lee setting out a mixture on a plate of whatever she had crammed in her pantry that wasn't instant ramen.

The man was still sitting beside him, hands and feet still chained, as he asked again, "Tell me about her, Obito."

Obito though leaned back, his eyes fluttering closed, distracted by his own dampened thoughts. Where was Rin in this place? He knew she was in here somewhere, he was certain of it, and he had always thought the world outside of the cave in his mind would be consumed by Rin. Yet, even as he glanced out the window of Lee's apartment, there wasn't a hint of her.

"All the furniture in my head's been rearranged," he said, eyes opening again and glancing back towards the kitchen, towards that familiar shadow of Eru Lee, "When did that happen?"

Not when he was fourteen, not when she first rescued him and took him on as an apprentice; it seemed like a slower, more gradual thing than that. Slow enough that by the time he was sixteen he hadn't noticed, hadn't realized until now, how unlikely it would have been for the fourteen-year-old Obito to abandon Konoha and Rin for months at a time, to delay promotion to jonin, just to follow Lee to worlds unknown.

Except he had done it almost without a second thought, as if there was no other path for Uchiha Obito and all roads led to Mordor.

"Obito," the man prompted, not unkindly, though the links of his chains clinked together with his impatience.

"Yes, Lee, you want me to tell you about Lee," Obito parroted, blinking out of some of his stupor. Except he stopped, looking at the man in growing confusion, and blurted, "What on Earth can I possibly say about Lee?"

"Anything," the man said, that edge he'd so carefully hidden entering his voice, making him look more reminiscent of a shinobi than the odd ethereal being he'd been before, "Why do you love her?"

Obito blinked, blinked again, feeling some of the dream slip from him. "I love shishou?"

"You gave her the ring of power of your own free will, you, who within hours were more ensnared than Isildur at the foot of Mount Doom when he damned Middle Earth for three thousand years with his mortal weakness. You had absolute faith, not that she would give it back to you or that you could steal it from her, but that she would not abuse it, and whatever actions she took would be the righteous. If that's not love, Obito Uchiha, what is?"

Obito mulled that over, tilting his head as he thought that through. If that wasn't love…

"Well," he said slowly, rubbing the back of his head as he searched for an explanation, "Shishou's incorruptible—"

"And you have faith in that," the man interjected, leaning forward towards Obito, eyes that mix of dark and pale burning like stars.

"Of course," Obito responded, a rueful and rather amused smile growing on his own lips at the very idea of doing anything but.

"Would you have had that same faith in Nohara Rin?"

Obito stopped, felt his heart stutter in his chest, and suddenly on the television screen instead of Schwarzenegger Arnold it was himself with the ring on his finger, standing across from Rin and…

And, to his horror, he didn't know if he would have been able to give it to her. Even if she had begged, screamed, he…

"Oh my god," he said slowly, then a little louder, "Oh my god, I'm in love with Lee-shishou."

Oh, he didn't like this dream.

The walls grew dark with shadows, stretched as his world contorted, and yet it was still Lee's apartment, as if his mindscape had long ago made this connection even if Obito himself had not. Like it was only Obito himself who was now getting with the program and everything had long since been in place just waiting for him to put two and two together.

"Christ!" Obito said, because now as he leaned forward, the television was playing through memory after memory of Lee from the beginning, and it was becoming very hard to deny. More, he thought with some alarm, it was becoming very hard to deny that he apparently did have a sex drive and it'd just been in hiding somewhere.

"I don't think I like this," he confessed to his friend on the couch, "Being in love with Rin was easy."

Well, it wasn't easy, but he had grown so accustomed to it. He'd spent most of his life being in love with Nohara Rin, now, and there was something certain in his constant rejection. As strange as it was, even with the pain of it, loving Rin was safe, if only because he'd accepted that it would never happen. He'd remain the same, like Lee with Minato-sensei, and he could pine all he wanted from a distance and nothing would change.

Being in love with Lee…

There was a whole world of possibilities, and each made him more vulnerable and uncertain than the last.

Except, he thought as he stared at the screen, at her smile... "Except I don't like lying to myself either, and I don't like… Not wanting, just because it's uncomfortable."

Hadn't he been proud of that? Of being who he was, feeling what he felt, and not trying to smother it like every single one of his cousins? If he couldn't admit to this, then he was a hypocrite of the worst degree.

"Yes," the man said, suddenly reminding Obito that he was here, "But why? How can you have such overwhelming faith in one woman?"

He turned to stare at his companion, his… friend, and simply asked, "Have you met Eru Lee?"

"Yes." It was not quite a hiss, but that undertone of exasperation, of ire, was far more present in it. However, in the dream, Obito just found this amusing, as it meant that the man hadn't truly met Lee at all.

Only the shadow of her, that irritating, incomprehensible thing, that so many people fooled themselves into seeing.

"Shishou is…" Obito trailed off. "You will never find someone more loyal, devoted, or valiant than Eru Lee. She is the hero, the prince or knight, in every story you've ever encountered, except that there has never been a princess waiting for her in a tower. Except even then, even when Minato-sensei married Kushina, she didn't even blink. She has always known what she is, even when so few seem to. They look at her and see what you see."

"Oh, and what do I see, Uchiha Obito?" the man asked with a smile that was at once charming and cruel.

"A fool," Obito said easily, "An utterly hopeless, infuriating, overpowered fool."

"Is she not a fool?" the man asked simply, but Obito could only grin.

"She's the best kind of fool there is," Obito said before giving a meaningful glance to his fair friend, "After all, she doesn't want you, does she?"

So that was the crux of the matter, Obito thought, as the man practically glowed with his suppressed rage. It was nice to know that even in his own warped dreams he was fairly good at reading people.

"No, she does not," the man said thinly. He paused then, brought his hands together, the chains clanking. Finally, as he stared forward at the screen, which still showed Lee's face, he asked, "Why is that?"

"She doesn't need you," Obito responded, again with a curious ease that probably wouldn't accompany him in the living world.

"No one needs the ring of power," the man scoffed, "Not truly, but all want it."

At this, he gave Obito a rather meaningful glance, as if to remind Obito that he was not immune to this either, that even wearing chains in his own mind Obito wanted the ring and would always want the ring.

Still, Obito thought, the man was missing the point. "Except she is so far beyond your grasp, your attempts at power, that she doesn't want it. I think Lee sees you for exactly what you are, just like I'm sure she sees me for exactly what I am."

"And what is that?"

Obito considered him, his golden visage, the anger prowling beneath it just out of sight, and the sudden thought that perhaps the man was not so unfamiliar. Perhaps, once, in some other world, Uchiha Obito might have had a taste of the bitter wine of damnation Sauron had drunk so long ago.

"A man who has given up."

And that, of course, was when Obito woke up.

He sat up, blinked as he took in his surroundings, waiting for his thoughts to chug into something that made some semblance of sense. It was bitterly cold, his scarred side ached, his head ached, there was a bitter aftertaste of something in his mouth, and the mat he was sitting on was doing nothing to block out the fact that he was sleeping on the floor of yet another cave.

This one, though, was high in the mountain range overlooking the endless snowstorm that had been going for days now. Trapping them up here ever since he and Lee had climbed back up the mountains days ago to find Shire Baggins and company where they'd left them. Which, unsurprisingly, they hadn't been where they'd left them.

And without the one ring—no, with the one ring around Lee's neck hemorrhaging chakra like no tomorrow, they hadn't a prayer of tracking them down. Especially, Obito thought with a sniff, not in a storm like this.

Obito's eyes slid over to Lee, still tending the fire as they waited for the storm to end all storms to pass. For a moment he just stared at her, taking in her profile, the slope of her nose and dark curves of her eyelashes.

There was something, he thought, very important that he'd realized that he was now forgetting. It was on the tip of his tongue, he swore, but whatever it was, it was close enough to nag at him but just out of reach enough to escape him.

He sighed, stood, and walked over to the fire to take his customary position next to Lee with a grunt.

"It's not your turn for watch yet," Lee commented lightly, not even looking at him.

Obito just grunted in turn, conveying in that single noise that it was too cold, and too noisy with all the wind to sleep.

His eyes drifted over her again, that thought that wasn't quite a thought still bugging him, until he found his eyes on her neck and the ring. It… wasn't as bad, he thought, as it had been before she sealed Sauron into some forgotten corner in his head. He still wanted it, but it was almost ignorable, like a momentary feeling of discomfort and distraction rather than an overpowering need.

His eyes moved to the entrance of the cave, to the snowfall outside and the howling wind, and noted with exhaustion, "It's still snowing."

"Yes," Lee said, "It's still snowing."

"If it keeps snowing," Obito said slowly, "We're going to end up buried under this mountain."

Lee said nothing, merely a small hum that neither agreed nor disagreed with him.

"If they're out there in this, if they didn't descend on this side or the other, then they're likely dead already," Obito said, as he couldn't picture the hobbits—let alone the grown men—surviving this without shelter.

"I choose to believe they're alive," Lee said, oddly serene and at ease considering their circumstances and what they were discussing.

"Because it's convenient?" Obito asked with a smile he couldn't quite help.

"Well, yes," Lee acknowledged, "But they seemed… determined, the kind you'd expect to conquer insurmountable odds."

Aren't you talking about yourself, he wanted to ask, but he caught himself before the word left his tongue. Instead he looked at her and stared, looked at the way the firelight danced across her skin, and the way the ring dangled on her neck and…

"Oh, shit," he said as a hint of his dream, of his surreal epiphany in his own head, came back to him in full force.

"Oh shit?" Lee parroted, raising her eyebrows and glancing at him, waiting for some sort of explanation for the change in atmosphere.

Except, Obito thought, he couldn't think of anything to say. Instead his face flushed and the words died on his tongue as she looked at him (him with the sharingan, the mangekyo sharingan no less) directly in the eyes without a hint of fear.

"If you're afraid he's going to have you join his harem," Lee said slowly, like even she wasn't sure this was the right conclusion to draw, "Then I think that ship has sailed… Although you may have unintentionally ended up in Sauron's homosexual man-harem of delight."

Obito gagged on his spit—he did not, oh he did not need those kinds of images right now. He ran a hand through his hair and then over his burning face, mumbling into his fingers, "I'm fine."

"Really," Lee said slowly, with no small amount of disbelief.

"I'm just…" Obito said, biting his tongue before he could say something truly embarrassing and stupid, "I've just had my life flipped on its head, that's all."

"Oh," Lee said, slowly, as if she didn't quite understand but was more than willing to take his word for it. Then, her eyes grew larger as she came to some internal conclusion. "Oh, oh I see… Well, Obito, know that I approve of whichever team you want to bat for, but I think you can do better than Sauron. Even if he is the hottest man who has ever lived on any planet—I mean, when he's not a giant eye of fire or a piece of jewelry."

Obito's head swung towards her, his eyes flew open, and he gaped as he asked, "What?"

Lee appeared to pay no mind as she patted him consolingly on the shoulder. "Though, to be honest, I always thought that if you were going to go in that direction that it'd be with Kakashi. Of course, it never really looked as if you were going in any particular direction, given Rin, but if that's the way you're going I heartily approve of Kakashi versus—"

"Shishou," Obito asked, throwing his hands in the air, "What are you talking about?"

"Your sexual awakening," Lee said, as if this was entirely natural and not at all awkward.

Obito was dying, no, he was already dead. This earthly shell left behind was just a shadow clone and the true Obito was committing seppuku internally out of the everlasting mortification and shame.

"Lee, I am not gay for Sauron," he said forcefully, but Lee hardly looked convinced as she stirred at the fire with a stick.

"Obito, everyone is gay for Sauron," she scoffed, then motioned to herself in that familiar and rather grandiose manner of hers, "If I was a man, I would be gay for Sauron."

He felt his eyebrows lower, irritation grinding at him, and something even worse than that. In the pit of his stomach, where there was that constant burning desire for the ring and now Lee, the embers turned and stirred, giving life to new sparks Obito would not have otherwise considered.

Obito did not need mental images of his master and Sauron, dick of all kages, in a ménage à trois with himself. He did not, and if his brain produced those images, it was because his head had been invaded by the man's chakra and clearly was ruining every fiber of Uchiha Obito's being.

"Are you saying, shishou, that you're attracted to him now?" Obito asked slowly, instead.

"Of course," Lee responded, "The man is very pretty, even if he is unbelievably petty and ridiculous. But the point is, if I was a man I would still be into that."

The man was very pretty; he was also currently occupying space in Obito's brain, and right now Obito had the distinct impression that the ring around Lee's neck was laughing at him.

"Although, if I was a man," Lee said, in a tone that indicated she was building up to some grand conclusion, "And I found Sauron unbelievably attractive, I could still do far better."

Obito just stared at her, at the way she grinned as if they had learned something very important today, and threw his head back and laughed. Not just laughed, but fell backward onto the floor of the cave with laughter.

Staring at the ceiling as his laughter subsided, feeling an easy smile spreading across his lips, he said, "You know, shishou, I think you're right. I can do so much better than him."

"Oh," Lee said slowly, looking down at him with a hint of confusion and perhaps alarm, "Good."

He just smiled up at her, those words that he'd said so many times to Rin on the tip of his tongue again, but…

They could wait, he thought. Not forever, not even for very long, but at least until they got down off this mountain. They could wait until the ring, he thought, was in someone else's hands and only a lingering temptation of longing for it left inside Obito's soul.

And he did wait, sitting beside her at the fire until morning when the storm, finally, began to lighten enough for them to pack their things and descend down into the valley towards the Gap of Rohan. And it didn't matter if things had changed or if nothing had at all, he was filled with…a strange assurance that, at least if Lee was leading the way, it would all work out in the end.

"We'll find them," Lee said as they descended, "They can't have gotten far, and I probably learned enough from Sakumo-shishou to get a hint of them. That, or if we can't track the shinobi midget, then maybe I can pick up the chakra of the old man jonin."

"You can sense anything with the ring in the way?" Obito asked, and she glared at him somewhat.

"Well, I didn't say it would be easy, but they could have only gone in two directions, right? And they were heading east, so I don't see why they wouldn't keep heading east."

"Great," Obito said, "Back towards _Mordor_."

Indeed, at the idea of east, the ring was giving off a pleased and amused hum, as if Lee and Obito were walking straight into his nefarious trap. He really was, Obito thought with more than a little exasperation, one of those overdramatic mustache-twirling villains in the flesh.

Or, well, in this case in a ring.

"And we'll probably run into the _nazgûl_ ," Obito muttered to himself with distaste, eyes already hunting the skies for black dragons and riders who had once been men but had been transformed into something much worse.

"So optimistic, my apprentice," Lee chided him, "At the very least we might be able to pawn off the ring onto Baggins before that happens."

Yes, Obito thought, but if they did, could Baggins and company protect themselves against them? They'd managed so far, he supposed, but Lee and Obito had inadvertently been drawing attention away from the group. They'd probably benefited greatly from the distraction of Lee and Obito flailing across the country.

More, the idea of them simply handing over the ring to them, only to have it stolen and taken to Sauron or used for whatever that group saw fit was not one Obito liked. He'd almost rather hold onto the damned thing than give it to anyone else.

Which of course, he could acknowledge somewhere in his mind, was the problem.

Then they reached the familiar north-south road.

Both looked down at it, at the dirt beneath their feet, both frowning.

"We shouldn't take the road," Obito said, because every time they took the road something terrible happened.

"They would have taken the road," Lee said, staring down the path.

"They would have tried to take the road and then gotten shanked by _orcs_ ," Obito said, and then, cursing, screwed his eyes shut and translated, "You know, the oni Sauron employs in his army of ultimate evil."

"I… am not sure I know the land well enough to not take the road," Lee said again, "And I can handle _orcs_."

(" _Take the road_ ," a soothing and friendly voice whispered just inside of Obito's ear.)

"Fine, fine," Obito said, throwing his hands in the air at an argument lost before it had even begun, "We will take the road, damn it all! But when we get ambushed by _orcs_ , I will say I told you so."

"And I will say," Lee said as they both started walking along the road eastward towards damnation and doom, "That no one has the resources to constantly plague the road with demon foot soldiers."

"They don't have to constantly plague it," Obito retorted, "Just as long as we're on it."

"You already ran through one raiding party of them," Lee pointed out, "And demon foot soldiers don't exactly grow on trees."

"Actually," Obito said slowly, "Not entirely true."

"They grow on trees?" Lee asked, eyebrows raising, undoubtedly thinking it now made both more and less sense that Sauron had an utter loathing of trees.

"No, no, but the soil beneath the trees makes…" He trailed off, his thought process lost, and realized that he must have been stealing information from Sauron's chakra in his head again. "I have got to stop doing that."

"Yes," Lee agreed, "It's a tad alarming. All the same, for all they know we could have passed over the mountains."

"In that storm?" Obito asked.

"For all they know we could be dead," Lee amended, "If I was a trigger happy kage, I wouldn't be sending out bands of _orcs_ to sit on the road for no reason."

The ring, Obito thought, was not no reason. Entire wars, he thought, had been fought, won, and lost over this one ring. Such a small, terrible, and admirable thing.

Of course, it only took an hour, the sound of feet on the road in clanking armor, for Lee and Obito to turn back towards the west and Obito to say, in a low and somber tone, "I told you so."

There were more this time, many more, not quite an army but not a raiding party either. They were taller and more muscular than the guardsmen of Mordor, placed in two columns with great shields bearing a white hand on the front.

Glancing down the road, towards the east, Obito could see they'd been cut off by a smaller band of the orcs, likely having waited there for an ambush for some time. Probably since Lee and Obito had taken their little tour of the mountains.

"Obito, can you hold off the ones ahead?" Lee asked, and Obito nodded.

"Then I'll take the west," she said, looking towards her opponents and noting as she drew out kunai from thin air, "It shouldn't take long."

It didn't. Lee was moving faster than they could think, blades easily flying through the small holes left in their armor while a great pit in the earth opened beneath those remaining to break formation.

Obito, for his own part, moved his hands together to form the hand seals of mokuton and raised great trees out of the earth and in the road to stagger his opponents before breathing fire towards them.

Except, as he did so, as always, a part of him was focused on the ring.

It was such a small thing, it looked so inconsequential, and in a way acted like it too. It danced about Lee's neck, escaping the confines of her jacket, gleaming in the sunlight and the bloodshed as she whirled. It would float in the air, for one second then another, as Lee's sword rammed through the neck of an orc while avoiding his scimitar.

And the ring, Obito thought with wide eyes, chose to abandon Eru Lee.

It floated in the air and then, as Lee rolled backwards onto the earth, the chain fell from her neck and onto the bloodstained earth. There, an orc's eyes fell and followed it, its dark hand reaching out towards it, and Obito was moving forward before he could even think.

He was vaulting over bodies, reaching and sliding over the earth as he grabbed it in one hand before the orc could touch it, only to look up and note the sword that was bearing down on him. Until, that was, Lee was moving in front of him, shielding his chest and sacrificing her own back in the process.

For a moment, time seemed to stop. There was a ring in his hand and shishou bracing herself over him. Then her eyes widened, and blood spurted from her lips and onto his face. Her face paled and lost any expression, and she stared down at him as if she couldn't see him anymore. A dark red blossom slowly grew on her uniform.

"Shishou!" he said, reaching up towards her (though one of his hands refused to let go of the ring, even for this, especially for this).

Lee forced herself to stand, blocked the next blow from the orc, moving forward and blowing his head off with ninjutsu. She hunched over then, breathing raggedly while blood dripped from her lips, even as Obito moved towards her and—

"Obito, watch behind you."

Something hard and metal rammed into Obito's head. He felt and heard himself fall to the earth with a dull thud, everything growing dizzy and distant. He watched as Lee, bleeding and clutching her side, with one hand threw several orcs away from the pair of them.

She then looked towards him, and he watched, with half-lidded eyes and a mind that could only half process what was happening, as she laced him with genjutsu.

"I'm stemming this at the source… I will find you," she said, her voice odd and distant-sounding, as if it was coming from very far away, "Stay alive, Obito, stay hidden, and I will find you."

And Obito, left on the ground with dirt and blood caked onto his skin and hair, watched as they dragged her away towards the dark tower in the west, his scarred hand still closed tightly around the one ring of power.

" _And you, Uchiha Obito, must be the worst kind of fool._ "


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to GlassGirlCeci on fanfiction for beta-ing the chapter. Updated earlier than usual thanks to commission by wakanda-2k18.

_Part 12: Obito makes a dubious bargain with a suspicious party, a princess is saved and a tower destroyed, and there is much rejoicing of a very interesting variety._

* * *

 

"And you, Uchiha Obito, must be the worst kind of fool."

His heart pounded in his ears, his eyes wide open yet blurred and dark at the edge of his vision in his right eye, while the sharingan kept track of the wave of orcs moving past him in that oddly disciplined movement that uruk-hai could manage when simple orcs and goblins could not.

The ring was still hidden in his hand, the only part of his body that did not feel like lead, and as he stared forward, he could only note that Eru Lee had now been obscured by the orcs making their way back west from whence they came.

Pale, warm fingers on his chin tilted his head up to look into the face of a man who wasn't truly there, only a figment of Obito's concussion. Yet, Obito thought, even if he wasn't real that hardly seemed to matter.

It was painful to look at him, like staring directly at the sun, yet all the same Obito couldn't look away as the man rolled Obito onto his back so he could stare directly up at him.

His smile, at a glance, seemed kind and sympathetic, but it was a thin disguise at best. The man's cruel amusement was all too plain beneath it; his eyes practically burned with it, and it was all too clear that he was infinitely glad that Obito was the worst kind of fool.

"Aren't you going to try to run after her?" the man asked, fingers trailing down the sides of Obito's face, not hesitating over the thick scars the cave-in had left behind, "Nothing good awaits her at Isengard, certainly, not with that kind of a wound."

He could still see it, smell it, that human blood bursting out of her like a flower and dripping down her lips, running down her legs even as she forced herself to stand and fight on. All, he thought, for a ring.

"You," Obito breathed, his voice rasping yet distant even to his own ringing ears, "Are a disease, a plague of madness and destruction."

"Perhaps," the ring, bathed in the pleasant fair form of Annatar, agreed with an easy smile, "But that does not change that you have sent her so nobly marching to her death, if not worse."

Obito stared into those eyes, almost as consuming as the sharingan, as the man said, "After all, Saruman is fashioning himself into the image of Sauron. Perhaps he will look at your dying master and not see something to be disposed of, but as Sauron himself would, see something to be made use of. Think of it: an eternity as a wraith, a slave, in service to the corrupted white wizard."

Obito allowed his eyes to flutter closed, took in a breath filled with the scent of mud and blood, and willed his legs, his arms, anything into movement. Slowly, terribly slowly, he crawled to his hands and knees, limbs quivering and head pounding.

They should have brought a medic, he thought grimly, why had they never thought to bring a goddamn medic?!

The man didn't laugh, didn't say a word, but all the same Obito could feel his jagged grin against the skin of his neck like a blade. And damn him but Obito still wanted it, wanted him, even when he made no pretenses, even when the poison that infested him was all too plain to see, Obito wanted him as all men wanted him.

Obito's fingers clawed into the mud, he grit his teeth, and that pounding in his head only became worse.

"You should be safe enough," the man noted lightly, his voice so damnably pleasant to listen to, "Your master is infuriatingly clever and powerful; that illusion she placed around you, around us… I cannot easily break it, and you have time yet before even the nazgûl hear my cry. Of course, whether she has time is an entirely different manner."

"You are not helping," Obito bit out, regretting it as soon as he said it, because of course the ring was not helping. The ring, Obito thought, was not here to help the likes of Uchiha Obito.

"No," the ring agreed, almost as if he was musing over that point, "I suppose I'm not. Frankly, I see no reason to."

"You have made your positions in this quite clear," the ring said, stepping in front of Obito so that Obito was staring down at his bare, glowing feet that somehow seemed to defy the dirt of the road, "You are not on my side, though you are too foreign and too bloodthirsty to find yourself on anyone else's. It would behoove me to dispose of you in any manner I can; your master, in particular, is an irritating thorn in my side."

He lifted Obito's chin once again, tilting it up while the man crouched down to look him directly in the eye. "If it were up to me, I would leave you lying in the dirt mankind crawled out of while your master rotted inside the dark tower of Isengard."

If it were up to Obito, Obito grimly thought, this man would be flesh and blood rather than hallucination, and Obito would be robbing him of all semblance of free will with the mangekyo sharingan. Then, Obito thought, they'd see which of them was the goddamn slave.

"Why isn't it up to you?" Obito asked instead, and here Annatar's eyes darkened into a shade that suited Sauron far more. His fingers clawed into the skin of Obito's jaw and his smile fell from his face.

And distantly, Obito heard the weight of chains, the golden chains binding Sauron's soul inside of his head, clanking together as they held the ring down in the mud with Obito.

"Oh," Obito said numbly, "Those."

"Those," the ring repeated, that pleasant smile back on his face for all that it was thinner than it should have been, "Your master is infuriatingly clever, even when she's an idiot."

"Yes, well," Obito said with an attempt at levity, wearing a shaky grin of his own that would have been far stronger if his head wasn't still rattling, "It's part of her charm."

The hands, suddenly, were gentle again and the voice lighter. "Yes, I suppose you would know all about her charm. However, you and I both know that there is a good chance she is not long for this world, not as she currently is."

"She is good at the impossible," Obito said, but his voice was still distant to him, and it didn't stop the well of fear and guilt swirling in his heart.

"I can help you, Obito," he said, warm hand now ruffling through Obito's hair, picking out clumps of mud and leaves, "You are not alone in this. However, there is only one way that I can help you."

Obito glanced up at him, took in that almost white glow of his skin and hair, and said dully, "Oh, right."

The man smiled, an amused, and almost fond thing. "I am a ring, Obito. To use your own terminology, 'it's what I do.'"

The physical ring, still hidden in Obito's hand, burned. Obito tried to force himself to his feet, slowly moved from one to another, but as soon as he was upright he immediately found himself swaying as the ground tilted with vertigo.

The ring, in the illusion of Annatar, merely watched as Obito fell back onto the road. Looking out, he noted that the orcs were gone, only the mess of their footprints left behind along with Lee's lingering genjutsu.

It was all too clear, Obito thought, that without a medic, without a goddamn miracle, Obito wasn't going anywhere near that tower any time soon. His head ached, and his thought process felt dangerously slow and distracted.

All the same, if he put that ring back on his finger, the chains, he somehow knew, would be broken and Sauron would have free rein in his head once again. Obito would be back to dangling on the edge of a precipice, slipping down and down into madness, into the curse of hatred that defined his family.

If he put that ring back on his finger, he would knowingly damn himself.

Still, he looked out towards the west, reaching towards it with a shaking hand as he whispered in despair, "I won't make it."

The sharingan, the mokuton, it wasn't enough; he couldn't even manage to drag himself there.

"No," the ring agreed solemnly, "Not as you are now."

Obito hesitated for a moment, considered the path ahead of him, considered the option where he didn't falter and instead dragged himself forward mile by mile until he was at the foot of the tower. Slowly, he lifted his hand and opened it, stared dully down at the ring of power.

With Lee's eye, it looked as plain and ordinary as ever, however it had no means of hiding from the sharingan. It burned in the palm of his hand, a bright miniature sun, even more so than Annatar himself.

Obito wondered if his own soul would burn that brightly.

"Well," Obito said as he looked down at it with a soft and painfully tender smile, "I suppose I've never been one for not damning the torpedoes."

More, he would gladly damn himself, damn the world, ten thousand times over if it meant saving those people most precious to him.

Closing his eyes, taking a breath in, he slipped it onto his index finger, and the golden chains inside his mind snapped. There was once again that blinding rush of chakra, of fire and life, coursing through his hand and towards his heart while Sauron's eye turned westward to find him crawling in the dirt right where he expected Obito to be.

As one, in the east, he could hear the nazgûl screaming, turning their sights towards him and the ring, but far enough away for now to be little more than a nuisance in the back of his head.

Suddenly it was all too easy to both get to his feet and to break out into a sprint towards the wizard's tower with the hand bearing the ring lowering to the hilt of his sword. Only, of course, to skid to a halt as the tower came into view.

Or, rather, what remained of the tower.

As Gandalf the Gray had noted to Baggins Frodo, the tower was not what it once was. The great forests were gone, stripped bare and leaving rich soil underneath to be used in the creation of the uruk-hai; the river, too, was dammed, and left instead a great pit of smoke and ash where Saruman's orcs could build their armory and munitions.

However, Obito and the ring's chakra now coursing through his blood, had at least expected the dark tower to be standing.

It looked as if it had not merely exploded but rather imploded, collapsed inwards under its own weight so that it now lay in ruins. The river, more, had been undammed and now was raging into the forge, extinguishing the fires, and drowning whatever unfortunate creatures had been left down there.

"This seems… wrong," Obito said to himself after a second's pause, rubbing the back of his head, and feeling a little at a loss. He couldn't say he'd been exactly looking forward to laying waste to the evil castle and saving the princess, but since he already had the ring on his finger and everything, he felt a little robbed for not getting the opportunity to do so.

The ring, Obito thought, was taking it much harder than Obito was.

Obito could feel memories that were not his rushing through him, emotions and names that did not belong to his past, along with a horrified and alarmed comparison to Luthien, who had thousands upon thousands of years ago sang her own tower into destruction.

However, Luthien, at the very least had had the decency to make it look difficult.

"It's a part of shishou's charm," Obito reminded the ring, himself as it were, under his breath, but he had the feeling that wasn't what it wanted to hear.

He bounded closer so that he was at the edge of the river, looking across and noting abandoned shields and scimitars of the orcs, as well as several dismembered limbs and the occasional decapitated head floating by.

Apparently, whoever this Saruman was, he had been flagrant enough for Lee to decide to show absolutely no mercy whatsoever.

" _She could not have been here longer than an hour…_ " he heard inside of his head, oddly clear and notable.

Obito's eye, though, drifted down towards his own reflection in the running water. It was… He couldn't quite make it out; the water wasn't quite calm enough, but it looked like he was glowing in the way Annatar glowed again. That immortal skin that always seemed to show the sacred fire more easily than the second-born.

However, beyond that, he couldn't get a good enough look to tell if anything really had changed.

"Christ, Obito, please tell me you didn't."

Obito looked up to see Lee, Lee as if nothing had happened at all. Walking over towards him on top of the river, still in her bloodstained clothing with her hair partially unbraided, and her expression a grimace of dismay rather than pain.

" _Did what?_ " Obito asked, then paused as he realized he had slipped unknowingly into Sindarin once again, "Did what?"

She reached him, rested her hands upon his shoulders as if to somehow ground him back into reality, and said, "I leave you for five minutes, Obito—"

"I was coming to rescue you," he said, swatting off her hand with some annoyance, as she could at least pretend to understand, "I was going to blow up the tower, slay the _orcs_ , and it was going to be very romantic."

Lee gave him an entirely too despairing look, rubbing at her temples as if she was Minato-sensei and Obito was making a point of being an idiot. "I told you to sit there and wait—"

"You were dying!" Obito shouted at her, his own hands flying to the sides of her face, while his voice lost some of that lyrical maia quality and instead shifted into ragged human desperation, "He stabbed you through the back, it was a stomach wound, and they were dragging you off to _Isengard_! I thought you were going to die if I didn't come!"

He had been so afraid, even in his concussed state, that she had been dead already.

Her hands moved to his wrists, attempted to remove them from her face as she retorted, "That doesn't mean that—"

"Yes, shishou, it does!" he said, gripping her face tighter, and without thinking, without considering, he moved his face forward so that his lips pressed against hers, "Weren't you the one who told me, Lee, that I would destroy worlds for Nohara Rin? Why would I do anything less for you?"

She drew her face back from his, blinked, blinked again, and then gave him a very odd look as she said, "Oh, hell, Obito what has he done with you?"

Well, Obito thought dully, now he was just offended. "Why did he have to do anything to me?"

"Obito," Lee said hesitantly, hands fluttering in the air then falling again as she searched for the words, "You… Your thing for Rin is almost as terrifying and intimidating as my thing for Namikaze Minato."

Obito thought that over, acknowledged the truth of it with a distance he couldn't quite justify to himself, except that in the grip of the ring it was even harder to hold onto Rin than it usually was. "Things change."

"Things change?" Lee repeated dumbly, before her eyes fell on his finger bearing the one ring and she dully said, "I suppose they do."

Oh, that was not fair, Obito thought. Even if the ring was seeping through his thoughts like poison, Obito thought, it was still flabbergasted at the thought that Lee had just casually destroyed the power of Isengard and healed herself of mortal wounds all in the same hour.

"How's this," Lee said, holding up her pale hands as if in defense, "You take that off, I try to do what damage control I can in your head again, and then you confess your undying self-destructive love for me."

"I take it off?" Obito repeated, using Lee's same dull tone as he parroted her words back to her.

"You take it off," Lee repeated, giving him a rather meaningful look as if there was something very important that he just wasn't getting.

Well, maybe Obito didn't want to take it off. Maybe he'd sacrificed enough to put it on his goddamn finger and he should at least get to smash some kind of tower out of it. Maybe, Lee should appreciate that Obito appreciated exactly what he'd gotten himself into!

" _Give her the ring._ "

Obito stopped, paused, felt his thoughts turn inward almost with betrayal. It was oddly comfortable, the feeling of foreign chakra and power coursing beneath his skin. It didn't burn as much as it had the first time, as if his body truly had adjusted to wearing it. Which, of course, made it that much harder to take it off and that much harder that the ring itself didn't want him.

" _She's right, Obito,_ " the ring whispered consolingly in his head, as if it was truly sorry that it had come to this, " _You should give her the ring. She'll never believe you if you don't._ "

Well, Obito supposed there was that. So long as the ring was on his finger, he thought, he could say anything he wanted and Lee would be convinced he was high on malignant chakra. Which, he supposed he was, but that didn't mean his words and feelings should be so easily disregarded.

Here he was confessing his love, robbed out of his very romantic tower smashing gesture, and she didn't believe him just because he was suffering from Sauron in the brain.

" _In fact,_ " the ring whispered in his ear, " _Perhaps she should learn to appreciate what it's like._ "

Appreciate it?

The ring continued, voice soft and soothing and oddly reminiscent of flower gardens in kingdoms which no longer existed, " _She's never had to bear a ring of power, only worn it around her neck; she has absolutely no idea what you're going through. Perhaps, she should learn to appreciate the burden you carry._ "

Perhaps, Obito thought slowly, she should. More, as always, he trusted her with its fate even more than he could trust himself. With a tender smile he nodded, slipped the ring from his finger, and before she could protest slipped it onto the index finger of her outstretched hand.

She sucked in a breath, her green eyes growing wide and beginning to glow with the influx of chakra, and then, before either she or Obito could say anything at all, she fell backwards into the river.

He stared down at her uncomprehendingly for a moment, then two, then cursed, "Shit!"

He dragged her out of the water, onto the shore, and then realized that his concussion hadn't actually healed itself but had just been delayed for a little while by the ring.

"Oh, hell," he said as he vomited into the river, then fell backwards onto the shore to join Lee, too exhausted, too dizzy, and too drained of chakra to even think of moving. Next to him, Lee was breathing deeply in and out, mind clearly elsewhere as she stared in a useless ring-induced daze up at the sky.

And all Obito was capable of thinking was that he should really make some kind of point to do only one horrifically stupid thing per day. He was probably at three already, at least, but still, whenever he could move again, he'd make that his New Year's resolution.

Only one lethally stupid thing per day.


	13. Chapter 13

_Part 13: Lee briefly becomes the lord of the rings, sort of, Obito reaps some consequences of his actions, and a new plan is formed to track down those goddamn hobbits._

* * *

 

 

“You didn’t tell me.”

 

Obito’s eyes opened, that surreal calmness and detachment washing over him once again, as if the world was a sea which he was merely drifting upon. He was standing on that little red bridge back in Konoha, where he had so often loitered as a genin, distracted himself long enough by staring at the river that he ended up late to training or some D-rank or another.

 

Today there was no team seven awaiting him, no Minato-sensei, and no Lee-shishou either.

 

He had nowhere to be and nothing to do except linger in this peaceful Spring moment.

 

It seemed his blonde, beautiful, friend had felt the same.

 

However, Obito thought as he glanced towards the man and his uncharacteristically grim expression, he did not look nearly so at ease as Obito himself. He looked tired, unnatural shadows etched beneath his bright eyes, that soft light that surrounded him now harsher and almost fluourescent as if too much of his energy was leaking into it.

 

“I didn’t tell you?” Obito asked.

 

The man looked over at him, eyes wide with some unnamed dread that did not belong in this soft world of Obito’s childhood, “You did not tell me, Uchiha Obito, what she truly is.”

 

“What who is?” Obito asked, too calmly, but he couldn’t seem to grasp what the man was saying or even who he truly was. Obito liked him, Obito was fond of him, and if Obito was being honest with himself then he wanted the man as well and had ever since he’d met him.

 

Obito wanted to be friends with him, if they weren’t friends already, and perhaps more than that if the opportunity arose. Only, sometimes, Obito felt he knew the man a little too well for that. As if the more he knew about the man, rather than the less, forced them further apart.

 

“Your master,” the man said, his lips twisting into a wry smile, that sardonic mocking thing he seemed so fond of.

 

“Ah, Lee,” Obito said fondly, a smile growing on his own lips at the thought of her. She was missing from this scene, he suddenly realized, him and the man weren’t enough, Lee had to be here too, “She told me she’s a god, you know.”

 

“A god?” the man scoffed, chakra visibly bristling about him, “The mortals thought of the _maia_ even the elves, Obito, as gods. The elves, Children of Ilùvatar as they are, worship the _valar_ as gods. The gods of mortal fools, Uchiha Obito, are rarely gods at all.”

 

“Shinobi aren’t often religious,” Obito mused, allowing his mind to drift through distant memories, “I suppose there are monks, who make use of natural chakra here and there, and the jashinists but otherwise we don’t have the inclination for religion. I wouldn’t use the term god lightly.”

 

Of course, Obito never really had used it. Lee was the one who had off-handedly told him early in his apprentice at god only knew what time in the morning, other than that it hadn’t come up much, had just been set as background context of something Obito should keep in mind. Otherwise it was mostly easier to think of Lee as someone who happened to have insane amounts of chakra and an insane amount of bloodlimits.

 

Sometimes she didn’t seem any more or less human than Obito as an Uchiha.

 

“And yet, you did not warn me,” the man said, giving Obito a dull an rather accusing look.

 

“You didn’t ask!” Obito responded, “You were the one who said you wanted her to see what it was like. You should have known that wouldn’t go well.”

 

“And why would I have known that?”

 

“Because she’s Lee,” Obito said with a small laugh, “She started up a cross-dimensional diplomatic program through black operations because she was considered too intimidating to do anything else but go straight into retirement! Minato-sensei, her best friend, doesn’t trust her with a genin team and you went and trusted her with your soul?”

 

“You’ve trusted her with yours,” the man spat back, no longer even making the slightest pretense at being a pleasant creature. Obito just thought it made him look more solid, more genuine, and better for it.

 

“Yes, well, as you’ve noted, I’m a fool,” Obito said fondly, not that he would have ever done anything less in any situation.

 

The man deflated, and as he did so Obito could see that he was more worn than he had let on. There were hints of bruises on his pale skin, hidden beneath the harsh glare of the constant light that surrounded him, his hair was frizzing in a way that seemed unnatural for him, and his clothes were in disarray.

 

“So,” Obito said slowly, “Lee-shishou beat the shit out of you, didn’t she?”

 

The man didn’t answer, instead with a thunderous frown he burst into a column of flame, then a comet, and disappeared from Obito’s quiet and pleasant landscape. Likely back to wherever Eru Lee awaited him, trying to reclaim his pride and win the next battle while knowing all too well that he had already lost the war.

 

Obito woke up laughing.

 

Then, just as suddenly, as memories of what happened before all this came back he stopped. He bolted upright, still nauseous from chakra deprivation as well as that goddamned concussion and tried to put together what had just happened. He’d let the ring back in his head, he’d put it back on his finger, Lee had been given a mortal wound and carted off to Isengard and he had gone after her. Lee hadn’t turned out to need his help at all, had singlehandedly demolished Isengard with a speed and style that Luthien would have been impressed by, and had confronted him about the ring. Then, at the ring and her prompting, he had decided to put it on her finger leaving the pair of them passed out on the bank of the river in enemy territory.

 

Because Obito was an idiot.

 

Sighing, pressing against his head, there was a tender lump at the back but nothing too devastating. Otherwise the worrying thing was that most of his clothes, everything except his underwear, seemed to have disappeared…

 

“So, you’re finally awake,” a cool, amused, and yet somehow chastising voice noted.

 

Obito’s head whipped to his left, regretting the motion instantly at the sharp pang in his neck as well as the throbbing of his head. It wasn’t Lee, he thought was some alarm, Lee was nowhere in sight.

 

They were in yet another cave, likely again hauled off into the foothills of the mountains and away from the wizard’s tower. A crackling fire had been set up and was fed by wood as well as chakra, Lee’s jonin uniform had been laid out to dry in front of the fire along with her silver headband, and there was Obito’s missing uniform as well as his supplies.

 

Instead of Lee lounging against the wall of the cavern and setting up wards there was a tall, thin, elven man who could only be from Middle Earth. His hair was a strange flaxen red, an almost rose-gold color, that alternated between silver, pink, and pale gold depending on the way the light of the fire touched it. It was like Lee’s in texture, curling out in all directions, long enough to reach his waist if left unbound, but currently tied up in a topknot. His skin was as pale as Lee’s or Obito’s, but let off that soft, strange, ethereal and comforting glow that Annatar’s had. All his features were fine and fair, but it was his eyes that caught Obito’s interest, a strange striking blue-green color like the sea in sunlight.

 

“We’d apologize for not fixing the concusion, but it’s not our forte” he said, a fond smile now curving on his lips, “Besides, you deserve it.”

 

His voice, Obito thought blinking, was beautiful. Not simply alluring or interesting, but beautiful to the point of distraction, where you were just tempted to close your eyes and listen to the sound of it.

 

He also wasn’t wearing much clothing, Obito suddenly realized, just a pair of dark hakima as he sat crosslegged against the wall.

 

The smile faded from the man’s face as he took in Obito’s lack of response, “You are alright, aren’t you, Obito?”

 

Obito opened his mouth to say something, anything, but found his tongue suddenly dry and his mind spinning. Who was this supposed to even be? He was talking like he knew Obito, more than knew Obito, as if they were very close. More, Obito felt… He didn’t know, but if this was anyone else, he’d have tackled to them to the ground and tried to kill them. Somehow, this strange man seemed familiar and comfortable enough with chakra alone that Obito had left him sitting there even while everything in him should have been panciking.

 

A normal shinobi would be panciking, the idea of being vulnerable inside a cave with a stranger, for Obito, well that was the seventh layer of Hell.

 

“Obito?” the man asked, pushing himself off the wall in one fluid motion. Then he was leaning over Obito, placing a hand gently to Obito’s forehead.

 

“You don’t feel as if you have a fever,” the man said softly, clearly deeply concerned even while Obito tried and failed to recognize what was happening, “Regardless, we can’t take you back to Konoha in this state and _Mandos’ Hall_ will freeze over before we take you to _Rivendell_ or _Lothlórien_.”

 

The man pulled back, cupped both sides of Obito’s face, and looked deep into his eyes without a hint of hesitation or fear, “Do you remember who you are?”

 

Well, now, that was just entirely too far. Suddenly that surreal drifting was washed away and placed by extreme irritation as he looked back at the man who might have been taking care of him since Isengard’s flooding.

 

“I know who I am!” Obito spat back, “I just have no idea who the hell who you’re supposed to be!”

 

The man blinked, looked at once shocked as well as hurt, his eyes widening in fear as well as sorrow. Then, in a moment of realization, he looked down at himself, specifically down at his hand. Obito’s eyes followed the man’s and he found himself looking at a familiar, glowing, golden ring with the black script written on its surface.

 

Oh no.

 

The man looked up, now grinning at having put together the pieces Obito was only just starting to, “Sorry, we had forgotten that we looked so unfamiliar and so masculine to boot.”

 

The hair, that curling out of control hair with hints of red throughout it, the pale skin, the green in his eyes, that flavor of overwhelming chakra, the long thin fingers, and now that Obito was looking for it hints of her nose and her cheekbones.

 

Lee hadn’t disappeared, Obito realized in growing horror, she lived in whoever this was.

 

“Lee?” he asked, his voice soft, uncertain, and horrified as he leaned closer to the man.

 

“The one and—” the man stopped, paused, and then smiled sheepishly, “Well, she’s in here somewhere.”

 

“Lee,” Obito breathed, his hands shaking and falling on the man’s bare shoulders, “What happened?”

 

“What do you think happened, Obito?” the man asked, suddenly looking irritated and impatient with Obito, “You shoved the one ring onto Eru Lee’s finger and expected pleasant or understandable results.”

 

“I didn’t expect—” Obito stopped himself, couldn’t find the right word, and instead motioned to the new and improved Lee in all her masculine and surprisingly attractive glory.

 

“Yes, well, neither did we but this seems to be the impasse we’ve managed to reach,” Lee said blandly, folding his arms against his chest and sulking, “We’re not exactly thrilled about it either, but, at the very least our combined chakra’s such a mess that Sauron seems to have lost track of us altogether as either Lee or the one ring.”

 

“What?”

 

The masculine Lee held up his hand, wiggling the fingers with the one ring among them, catching firelight and shining tantalizingly, “We mean that we’re something new, something that’s never been done before by valar or maiar, and not even Sauron knows how to look for us now. The lord of the rings can’t find us like this. Even better, with the ring on our finger, the ring’s chakra isn’t in the way and we can track down the goddamn _hobbits_ and finally go our separate ways.”

 

“So, we’re still doing that,” Obito noted blandly in turn. He wasn’t sure why, maybe it was the fact that his head still felt raw, they’d just taken out a wizard’s tower and his army of cannibals, or the fact that shishou was now, well, a man, but he’d thought that maybe they might do something other than hunt down Shire Baggins.

“Of course, we’re still doing it!” the ring said, and there was Lee Obito thought, shining through this strange hybrid with a force not to be denied, “It’s the one thing we actually manage to agree on! The only thing we want, Obito, is off this merry-go-round. And if _hobbits_ are the only way to do that then by _Eru Illùvatar_ , _hobbits_ it shall be!”

 

Obito looked at him, this male version of Lee, somewhat puzzled. There was a lot he could say to that, but what came out was, “Why do you keep using the royal we, shishou?”

 

The man stopped, blinked, and glanced ruefully down at the ring again, “Well, it’s not just your shishou in here, Obito.”

 

Obito blanched, felt his stomach drop several feet, “You don’t mean—”

 

“Yes,” the man, Lee and the ring, said with a fond smile, “We do mean just that.”

 

“Oh no,” Obito moaned, rubbing a hand over his face and through his hair, wiry and coarse as always.

 

What had he done?

 

“God, shishou,” he said, not even able to bring himself to look up at her, him, “I’m so—I’m so sorry. I don’t even—”

 

“We’re not going to say it’s alright,” the man cut Obito off forcefully, “It’s not, it was hardly pleasant, and even at this point it’s a bit existentially uncomfortable. But Obito, we know you meant more than well. Had we been in your situation, limited to your powers, we would have done the same. More, we would have lacked your contrition for doing what we felt needed to be done.”

 

The man looked directly into Obito’s eyes, those strange blue-green ocean eyes burning, and Obito found he could not dare to look away, “That is not to say we are not upset with you, that we had not expected something else, but we more than understand. We, too, have recklessly followed the road into damnation for causes far lesser than your own.”

 

The man smiled, a smile that somehow was both Sauron’s and Lee’s, all his self-deprecation and all her sense of irony, “But don’t do it again.”

 

He didn’t nod, didn’t make any movement, simply breathed for a moment before admitting softly what he had tried and failed to say earlier, “Shishou, you do know I love you, don’t you?”

 

The man didn’t say anything for a moment, simply quietly considered Obito, as if seeing through to the very heart of him and judging himf or all he was worth. Finally, with more than a trace of bitterness, he stated, “All men, elves, dwarves, hobbits, maiar, all beings with the sacred flame burning inside their souls love the one ring.”

 

Oh, yes, he was fully aware of that, he was paying for that even now. Worse, Lee was paying for that. Still, sadly and softly he smiled back at her, disguised as she was by the ring’s chakra, “No, Lee, I mean you.”

 

Lee, in her strange masculine form, paused for a moment, eyes wide, and there it was a flush across his high cheekbones. It looked odd on him, unnatural, as if neither of his components had ever really flushed like that before. It made him look young, younger than either Lee or Sauron ever could, and suddenly Obito could see what Lee must have looked like when she was around his own age.

 

The man frowned, crossed his arms again, “There’s a better time for this sort of thing, Obito.”

 

“You mean when you aren’t wearing the ring?” Obito asked with his own smile, noting the way the man was pointedly not looking at him.

 

And if Obito was going to go this far without any shame at all he might as well go a little further. With a grin he noted, “You know, Lee, you asked if I was gay for Sauron, but I think I’d go gay for you.”

 

The man’s face went a bright, scarlet, red and he threw Obito’s shirt back at his head, “Go back to sleep!”

 

Obito laughed, feeling oddly at ease given the alarming situation he was now stuck in. As he put his under shirt back on and leaned back onto the mat he’d been sleeping on he looked at him, and now that he looked the man really did look quite a bit like shishou, like the brother Lee had never had, “You know, even if I sleep, even if you take off the ring it will still be true tomorrow.”

 

“And Rin?” the man asked, his beautiful clear voice almost raw with the emotion of his words.

 

“I don’t know,” Obito confessed, a pang in his heart at the thought of her, but it was distant, “Except, shishou, I came with you to Arda, I left Rin and Konoha, even before I saw the ring.”

 

The man looked as if he, as if Lee inside of him, had never realized that before. Had not realized, perhaps, that Lee had done much the same. When Lee had left Konoha, had left Namikaze Minato and his wife, she had asked Obito and Obito alone to come with her.

 

They’d find the hobbits soon enough, Obito thought, and then the world would wait for them.


	14. Chapter 14

_Part 14: In which Obito and his new almost-Lee friend traverse through dungeons dark and deep in search for hobbits and try to solve some existential riddles._

* * *

 

 

“You’re not serious.”

 

They had trecked down the mountainside as soon as Obito had recovered enough to hobble along, away from the dark shadow of what remained of Isengard, north against the mountainside with the man who both was and wasn’t Lee guiding the way with a spring in his step and a whistle on his lips.

 

She… He… Well, Obito didn’t know what to think of this quasi-Lee-shishou he’d been stuck with for the past few days. For that matter, he didn’t think that the man entirely knew what ot think of himself either. He seemed to fluctuate between being Lee and being something else, drifting effortlessly between the languages of Middle Earth, Obito’s mother tongue, and English without even seeming to realize it.

 

His clothes, formed from nothing, weren’t much better. They’d started rather traditional, the kind of clothing one expected from the clan war era, dark hakima combined with a dark blue kimono with Lee’s sword and weapons strapped to his waist. As they’d kept walking, through the sun and the rain, a thicker travelworn cloak that clearly belonged to Middle Earth joined the mix along with a pair of leather boots to replace his sandals until he started looking like a fashion and culturally confused disaster.

 

His eyes, too, would drift between Lee’s green and Annatar’s blue. His hair, changing with the light from red, to gold, to a pale almost silver color. Even his face, at certain angles would look either like Lee or else like Sauron’s fairest of forms.

 

The more Obito stared at him, the easier it was to believe that he was the idea, the dream, of a person formed from two very disperate beings.

 

In that time, he hadn’t once taken off the ring and turned back into Lee and a piece of jewelry, citing a need to keep on Baggins Frodo’s (because Shire was apparently a place and not a name) trail. Which, the longer it went on, the more uncomfortable and torn Obito found himself feeling. The ring’s effect seemed to have lessened, though he could still feel some of its shadow pressing down on his mind, which was certainly a relief, but the longer Lee stayed like this the more he began to fear she’d somehow end up staying this way.

 

She wouldn’t, of course, this couldn’t possibly go on forever and neither the ring nor Lee wanted it too but…

 

But this person, while he wasn’t Sauron or the ring, wasn’t entirely Lee either. And every once in a while, Obito was pointedly reminded of that. Lee, for example, would never have brought Obito to this place unless there was truly no other choice. The new and improved Lee hadn’t even bothered to hesitate.

 

“We’re perfectly serious,” he said in that clear and pleasant voice, slipping as always into that royal we that was really starting to bother Obito.

 

Obito glared at him, taking in that innocent look on his far too pretty face as the man smiled back. Obito hated to say it, hated to even think it, but the man really was prettier than Lee by herself. Lee wasn’t unattractive, Obito was aware of how attractive she was, but there was also something raw and intimidating about the way she looked. Power bled off her, was contained in every glance, but this man wasn’t quite like that. He was more tempered than Lee herself, not necessarily less powerful but his chakra calmer and more tranquil, a little more inviting and naturally likeable than Lee by herself.

 

It still didn’t mean Obito liked where they currently were.

 

They had upgraded from the Gap of Rohan with the ruins of Isengard towering above them and the deadly blizzards of the mountain pass to a valley that looked as if it should be serving as the entrance to the underworld. Everything was dark and dead, the jagged stones of the mountain serving as their surroundings along with an opaque stagnant pond behind them. A thick gray fog hovered over the water and the earth, giving the air a musty and unpleasant taint. Worse, they were now facing what clearly had once been the entrance to a grand cavern, one that had suffered what looked like a very recent cavein.

 

“Tell me, Shishou,” Obito said, trying to keep the edge out of his voice as he stared forward at the path this man clearly intended to take them down, “When I see a cave, a cavein like this, what’s the first thing I’m going to think of?”

 

The man blinked, once, twice, and then appeared to remember who Obito was again and why he wasn’t overly fond of caves, “Oh, right, that.”

 

“Yes, Shishou, that.”

 

“Well,” the man rubbed at the back of his head, in that sheepish manner that belonged to Eru Lee when caught in an awkward bind, “We can’t help where they’ve gone. More, with the Gap of _Rohan_ watched by _Isengard_ and the mountain pass made impenetrable they would have had no choice but to go through _Moria_ if they wished to cross the Misty Mountains and cut us off before we could reach _Mordor_.”

 

The man considered Obito, those blue-green eyes taking in every piece of him as if breaking Obito apart and putting him back together again, “We suppose you can stay here and wait until we get back.”

 

“And let you walk off with Lee?” Obito balked, tempted to do a double-take towards the blonde, “I don’t think so.”

 

“You’re the one who put us together,” the man said back, looking a little offended as well as a little annoyed, some strange mix of Lee’s temper when she’d reached her nonsense limit and Sauron’s prickly pride, “It wasn’t exactly our idea, we certainly didn’t ask to be made.”

 

“Yes, you did!” Obito retorted, pointing a finger into the fabric of his conjured kimono, “You said to put the ring on her finger! And drugged idiot that I was, I listened!”

 

And God, Obito was regretting that. In fact, he was regretting most of this latest and greatest adventure he and shishou had found themselves on. If they just hadn’t wandered into that pub, or if they’d just done anything but go to Mordor, then they wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place!

 

(Except, perhaps, if Obito had never come to this place then he wouldn’t have looked twice at Lee or his relationship with Rin. He would have gone on as he was, blissfully unaware that everything had changed, and even if Shishou was a man who was not entirely herself Obito could not regret where they were, not truly.

 

And even if she was a man right now, even if the ring was in there with her, maybe because the ring was in there with her, Obito still wanted her even in a place like this.)

 

“And if he’d known any better, he never would have asked you to do it!” the man shouted back, before dramatically motioning down at his thin and almost effeminate body, “Look at us! We’re a giant mess of a _maia_! We’re not even sure if we are a _maia_ right now! All we want is just—No, we don’t even know what we want! We can’t even agree on that!”

 

“I thought you wanted to give the ring to Baggins Frodo,” Obito commented, crossing his arms and cocking his head as he witnessed what looked like something of an existential crisis.

 

The man raked golden hair away from his face with a sigh as he distantly responded, “No, no, that’s just the compromise we could agree on. That neither of us want Lee, want you especially, to have the ring. But Lee doesn’t want the ring to go back to _Mordor_ and Sauron, and she thinks the ring is an idiot for wanting it himself, and the ring doesn’t really know what he wants at all. He didn’t even think he was something capable of truly wanting…”

 

Obito suddenly felt this was getting a little too deep and that he was starting to get a little lost, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

 

The man smiled, a small and soft thing, and said with that quiet fondness that Lee had directed to Obito so often, “Even we don’t know anymore.”

 

“Right,” Obito looked towards the cave, towards the rockslide blocking its entrance. For a moment, standing there with his heart thrumming, he felt the world tilt and as if he was in another place and another time entirely. In that single moment in the entrance of the cavern before the rocks had come tumbling down, that one single momen that had…

 

Obito forced the thought away, took a breath, “So, they’re inside there?”

 

The man lifted his head, nodded earnestly, but at least now bothered to look conflicted.

 

“The sooner we… separate you two the better, isn’t it?” Obito asked, and again, after a moment of hesitation the man nodded.

 

“Good, let’s get going then,” Obito said, watching as the man nodded slowly and, with exertion of chakra, cleared the path for them to step inside. Only somehow, Obito thought as the man created a small ball of light to hover above his fingertips, it was worse on the inside.

 

“Oh, it’s filled with dead people,” Obito said as he couldn’t help but meet eyes with one of the many skeletons lining the entrance, “Of course it’s filled with dead people.”

 

Still, he couldn’t help but think, at least the dead people weren’t also plants. Then, surely, Obito would know he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and wound up in Hell. No, in a way this was better, it looked so different than Madara’s cavern. There were carved steps and walls, people had built and crafted this place into something magnificent long ago, whereas Madara had festered in the forgotten edges of the world.

 

He breathed a sigh of relief, allowing the memories to drift back into his subconscious, because whatever waited for them in this _Moria_ at least it wasn’t the memory of Uchiha Madara and his madness.

 

“Yes,” Lee’s hybrid said distantly as he too eyed their surroundings with cool assessing eyes, “Dwarves have an unfortunate habit of digging too deep in forbidden places. We’d best get moving, they’re likely a few days ahead and the less time we spend here the better.”

 

With that they moved forward, carefully stepping over the scattered remains of dwarves, small humanoid creatures that Obito couldn’t place, and the broken weapons they had left behind so many years ago.

 

Obito turned his attention to the Lee that wasn’t quite Lee. He looked pensive, lost in thought as he moved forward, following a chakra signature that Obito himself couldn’t sense. Again, watching the light play on his sculpted face, Obito was struck by how much of both of Lee and the ring he could see in this man. Even in a quiet moment like this, he couldn’t tell if one or the other was moving them forward, perhaps even they didn’t know who was in charge.

 

“Shishou?”

 

“Yes?” the man answered absently, still looking at their surroundings, eyes wandering over the dark depths of the caverns expanding beneath them.

 

“How long do you think this will take?” Obito asked, his eyes unwillingly drifting to the ring on Lee’s finger, fiery words etched on its glowing surface, “I mean, how long are you going to be wearing the ring?”

 

“We expect for a few more days at least. We’re unfamiliar with this place, and it wouldn’t due to get lost and stumble on something best left forgotten. That said, they’re moving much slower than we are, so I doubt we’ll lose them.”

 

“Then…” he stopped, paused, and finally just forced himself to blurt it out, “Do you think you can cut it out with this we business?”

 

The man didn’t stop, but he did blink and look down at Obito, so like shishou when caught off guard, “What?”

 

“Your royal we,” Obito said, “It’s been bothering me.”

 

“What else are we supposed to say?” the man asked before quipping, “After all, there is no I in team.”

 

The sad thing was, Obito thought with some horror, he wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to blame that terrible statement on Lee or the piece of magical jewelery. He had the sudden thought that Lee and the ring had combined into something much worse than either could ever be alone.

 

Soon enough he might start saying that teamwork made the dream work.

 

Obito shuddered and forced himself to move past it, moving his eyes upwards to meet the strange turquoise of his eyes that was at once familiar and not at all, “Except there isn’t really a we, is there? You’re clearly not coming to mutual decisions about everything, you said it yourself. The only thing you two could agree on was findng Baggins and passing the ring off to him.”

 

The man looked very uncomfortable at that pointed truth, rubbing the back of his head again, a light flush blooming on his cheeks, “Well…”

 

“Besides,” Obito insisted, “I have to have something to call you besides Lee or Shishou, since you’re not quite either.”

 

It was…

 

Obito kept having to remind himself that this was and wasn’t Lee. Calling him shishou, thinking of him as Lee but with an extra helping of ring, that wasn’t helping any of this.

 

“That is true…” the man said, looking somehow even more uncomfortable than he had before.

 

He was certainly as expressive as Lee could sometimes be, you could practically see everything he was thinking written there right on his face. However, somehow, he was likeable for it. Perhaps he was even more likeable than either Sauron or Lee for it. There was a charming honesty to his every word and movement that compelled you to fondness no matter what ridiculous thing he was saying or doing.

 

“What about Leeron?” Obito asked, and here the man stumbled forward, almost falling flat on his face, arms flailing for balance as he spluttered at the very thought of being called something as terrible as Leeron.

 

Quickly, the man recovered, whirled back towards Obito with a shinobi’s speed and grabbed him by the shoulders, “Don’t even think it! Names are dangerous things, very hard to get rid of, and what if I get stuck with that?!”

 

Obito couldn’t help but smile back, a smile that was perhaps a bit too smug but Obito thought he deserved to give nonetheless, “I don’t know, it has a nice ring to it, Lee and Sauron crammed together. It has a nice simplicity to it.”

 

Obito thought he was personally rather good at bestowing names upon people. Bakashi, after all, had never gotten old.

 

“Leeron doesn’t even make sense!” the man cried, stepping away from Obito and tugging at his thick hair in overdramatic despair, “ _Li_ is just a plural prefix, so Liron is just… The one who is many, if it’s even that. It’s a grammatical mess is what it really is.”

 

“Considering your current multiple personality disorder, I think it suits you rather well,” Obito couldn’t help but point out, much to Leeron’s hair-tugging despair.

 

“At least…” the man stopped, summoned a notepad and ballpoint pen from thin air, and began sketching out kanji, “Well, if we spell Lee with the character for ‘dawn’, we could just translate that into _Quenya_ with Amaurëa. It could even bastardized _Quenya_ if you really want it to be Amaurëaon… Or I could go by Indil if you want to translate my mother’s name into _Quenya_.”

 

He held out the sheet of paper to Obito with a grin, Lee spelled out in the various kanji characters Lee often used, along with the scribbled character of the different alphabets of Middle Earth.

 

“Just not Leeron, please.”

 

It was a pity, Obito thought as he looked down at the sheet with raised eyebrows, because Leeron was much easier to pronounce.

 

Still, Lee-shishou was in there somewhere, more than just in there… For a moment, even though Obito knew he owed the ring nothing, owed the ring less than nothing even, he couldn’t help but like this strange combination of the pair of them.

 

He wasn’t Lee, but then, maybe he shouldn’t have to be Lee.

 

Staring at him, here in the dark cave, standing beside Obito when he could have abandoned him at the entrance or somewhere along the way. Well, Obito couldn’t help that maybe he and shishou, even in this form, could be friends or perhaps even more than that.

 

“Alright then, Amaurëa it is,” Obito said, “At least, until we find Baggins.”


	15. Chapter 15

_Part 15: Leeron embarks on a journey of self-discovery as he tries to find out who he is and if he really does want to head east, Obito remembers his love of caves, and some idiot summons the goblins._

 

* * *

 

 

Caves, why was it always caves?

 

No, why was it always caves after the Kannabi Bridge?

 

Before then Obito had barely been in caves, hadn’t had any issues with them, now it seemed as if he was in caves all the damned time. Like he couldn’t escape them. Every time he thought caves were behind him, a thing of the past, he had no choice but to descend into the next one.

 

It was in some ways both worse and better than Madara’s cave. There had been a feeling of claustrophobia in there, of constant darkness pressing down, of being too close to people who were festering from their hatred of the world and all its inhabitants. There’d been no escape, from that place, from Madara, and that had been the trouble.

 

That all-consuming feeling that given enough time, Obito would crack and do whatever it was Uchiha Madara wanted from him.

 

This place wasn’t like that. For all that it was dark it was grandiose, the ceiling a black pit that seemed to stretch on for miles, and below them an equally large crevasse. More, as they walked deeper and deeper, guided by stone paths fallen into ruin, the further it seemed to go.

 

This wasn’t a cave, Leeron had explained in unusually good cheer, it was the path to a great dwarven city. He was smiling, that smile that was some odd perfect mix of Lee and Sauron, even as he held a small glowing flame in the palm of his hand to light their path, looking over the crumbling steps and winding path with fascination.

 

“Of course, it seems to have fallen into ruin some time ago,” Leeron noted, sounding at once just like Lee and not at all, her memories and knowledge blending seemlessly with something else’s, “That was always a habit of dwarves, one that Sauron took advantage of and excrabated.”

 

“What do you mean?” Obito ask, unable to help just staring at him, at how oddly well they meshed. He wasn’t sure if it was him or not, but it seemed like it was getting harder in a way to tell which parts Lee and which parts were the ring. Hints of both were certainly there, but that clear division he would have expected wasn’t.

 

This moment, for example, the levity was Lee’s, but it wasn’t just her levity here. It felt like he was talking to Lee, and yet at the same time, something was off. Not just the voice, the hair, or the body but something he couldn’t put his finger that made this person almost Lee but not quite.

 

“Sauron, in the guise of Annatar before the one’s creation, gifted seven dwarf kings with rings of power. The men who were given rings later became the nine, immortal wraiths forever slaves to his will, the elves who secretly bore the three created by Celebrimbor escaped this fate entirely, but while the dwarves escaped the fate of the nine they fell prey to their greed and isolation.”

 

“At that last battle,” Leeron noted somberly, glancing down at the ring on his finger with a frown, stroking its golden surface, “When Sauron last wore the ring and the remnants of _Numenor_ and the elven kingdoms stood against him, the dwarves were not there, and the elves have never forgotten it. Since then, kingdom after kingdom has annihilated itself by digging too deep and summoning the monsters Morgoth left behind.”

 

Obito stared, stared harder, then reminded the man, “Leeron, you realize I understood about ten percent of that, right?”

 

It wasn’t so much the foreign words, though those were bad enough, but the casual namedrops that the man said as if of course Obito was supposed to understand them. He was as bad as Lee was with her damned pop culture references, springing them on the unawares without a word of explanation, as if it was somehow your fault you didn’t understand the glory that was Star Wars.

 

Just as it was now Obito’s fault that he had no idea what a Morgoth was except that it might be Mothera’s uglier kaiju cousin.

 

Leeron blinked, flailed, and then spluttered with a mortified blush spreading across his cheeks, “I told you not to call me that!”

 

“I’m sorry but it’s so much easier to remember and pronounce,” Obito said, and he had given it a try, for a few days. Somehow though, it just hadn’t seemed to stick, and the only thing Obito could think of when he looked at the abominable hybrid was Leeron.

 

That, and somehow his reaction… Obito didn’t want to say it, didn’t really want to think it, but it was positively adorable. For someone so refined looking, so damned pretty, he had inherited Lee’s sense of ridiculous drama and the juxtaposition of that in his face just made it irresistible. Obito almost had to call him Leeron, if only to see this face again.

 

“I don’t care if it’s easier for you!” there was the ring’s pride, practically burning in those jade eyes of his as he suddenly loomed over Obito, “If I get stuck with something like Leeron I will never forgive you!”

 

“You brought me in a cave!” Obito shouted right back, because even if Lee was currently held captive by a ring, he still was bitter about that, “Besides, what does it matter? You’re the one who said you’re not even really a person!”

 

Leeron stopped, looked as if Obito had just slapped him across the face, as if he’d somehow forgotten he was just a mixture of two people (one of whom was just a pile of chakra shoved into a ring), “Right, yes, of course…”

 

“Lee?”

 

Leeron seemed lost in his thoughts though, any hint of an expression slipping from his face, leaving only that alien elven cast to his pale features behind as he mechanically kept walking. Obito hesitantly followed, not quite sure what he was supposed to do here. He wanted to… He wanted to say something, do something, but this wasn’t quite Lee. She was in there somewhere, and he wouldn’t leave her in there, but he didn’t really know this person.

 

Did he?

 

“You know,” the man finally said, stopping in his tracks so quickly Obito nearly bumped into him, “I think he would like to be a person, if he could.”

 

“Huh?”

 

“The ring,” the man said, glancing back over his shoulder at Obito, “He has no sacred fire, no will or thoughts of his own, was only intended to be a clockwork tool for Sauron guided by nothing but the need for survival and a call to return to his master, but he—It would be nice, to be something other than a ring, something with some will in this world.”

 

Obito rubbed the back of his head, suddenly feeling quite awkward, and not even sure if he agreed. Regardless of what Sauron had intended, from what Obito had seen of the ring… Chakra was the closest thing to the soul, even engraving it in objects, wiping it of its memory, halving it, the impression of the human soul and spirit was left behind.

 

The man haunting Obito’s mind had been proud, bitter, ambitious, and cunning but more than that there had been a ruthless intelligence in his eyes. He was not the clockwork toy that Leeron was describing.

 

More, though, Obito noted, “He wants to return to Mordor, at any cost, that’s certainly something.”

 

“Should we?” the man asked.

 

“Huh?” Obito repeated, feeling very lost and more than a little dumb. Leeron didn’t seem to mind however, didn’t even seem to notice, just stared calmly past Obito into the dark path ahead of them.

 

“I have been in this world such a short amount of time,” he said, yearning in his voice as he said it, the sound of Lee’s voice whenever she was too far gone in bitter memories of the third war, “And I have seen so little of it. Only the foothills, and only these dark forgotten caverns with you at my side. And the ring, in three-thousand years, has somehow seen even less of it than I have. At the end of this road, if he gets what he wants, then he will never see any of it again. He, in fact, will cease to exist altogether, be assimilated back into Sauron’s unfractured _fëa_.”

 

Suddenly, Obito didn’t like where this was going. Lee, he fully believed, was as close to incorruptible as any being could ever get. She wouldn’t falter, she would never break, and if it had been her in that cave with Madara he would have crumbled into ash before she gave him what he wanted.

 

However, she could be convinced to go to extremes for the sakes of those she cared about. Even, he thought, for those she didn’t. She’d come for Obito in that cave when she only distantly knew him as Namikaze Minato’s genin student.

 

With that thing talking in her head, acting like her bestfriend, he wondered if she might be convinced to do something for him.

 

Leeron looked down at his hands, as if in wonder, “Look at me, even if he sees through my eyes and hears with my ears, he is moving and walking and seeing where before he had nothing but the depths of the Misty Mountains for hundreds of years. I can go anywhere in the world, east but also west, I can see everything I missed hidden away beneath these mountains… He had so much patience, but what was it for? What does he get by going back where he belongs? Why can’t he stay only a little while longer? Why does he have to disappear like this?”

 

“Because we are not taking that thing back with us,” Obito said, startling the man from his thoughts. With a sigh Obito held out his hand, palm up, “Give it.”

 

Leeron looked at Obito’s scarred palm, then barked out a laugh, amusement once again a mix of Lee and the ring’s, “Are you mad? You can’t last ten seconds with it simply hanging from my neck. And the moment I take it off the nazgûl will no exactly where we are.”

 

“I don’t care,” Obito hissed out, “You’re not wearing that thing anymore.”

 

“Relax, my faithful apprentice,” Leeron said, his smile for a moment twisting into something that was entirely Lee, that dangerous fox-like amusement when she was both amused and annoyed in the same moment, “Lee is hardly that far gone, and while she might feel a little sympathy here and there, she’s also a fan of letting people damn themselves if they wish to. Sauron has been destroying himself for thousands upon thousands of years, who is Lee to get in the way of that? The ring goes to Baggins and no other, you have my word, Uchiha Obito.”

 

They started moving again, Leeron in a seemingly better mood, whistling as he walked while Obito fell behind. God, the man even walked like the pair of the mixed together, there was Lee’s honed and refined gait put together from over a decade of training along with Annatar’s natural alien grace. Yet, for all that both parties were coordinated and ethereal in their own right, there was something utterly ridiculous about the way he moved, like he was frolicking along on some adventure.

 

“Do you have an estimate?” Obito asked, “On that finding Baggins thing? Not that I’m not enjoying my tour of yet another cave, or anything, but I’d really like to get that done with.”

 

“It shouldn’t be too long,” Leeron noted with a smile, apparently all dark feelings banished away for the moment, “I’d say we’re nearly on top of them.”

 

“It’s really too bad, you know,” Leeron mused with a sigh, looking upwards for a moment at the ceiling.

 

“What is?” Obito asked.

 

“Well, it’s just, I didn’t get much of a chance to know you,” Leeron said, motioning down at himself casually, the Leeron that was not quite Lee, “Like this, I mean, it’s… You’re so close to Lee, and though the ring would never admit it you share more traits in common than you’d think, and I just thought—Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter, we’ll be going our separate ways soon enough.”

 

“Somehow,” Obito drolled, “I think that’s for the best.”

 

Leeron just grinned back, that undaunted smile that Lee so often wore, and Obito wondered if it was normal to feel that smile tugging on his heart. Yes, it really was for the best, the less time Obito spent with this guy the better.

 

With that Leeron suddenly stopped, holding up a hand. He shifted, more of Lee appearing in that stance, the honed movement of Lee preparing for battle. Obito stilled as well, straining his ears and staring out into the dark.

 

Far in the distance, a crashing sounded, then another, on and on as if something had fallen down into the mines hitting over and over again against the stones below.

 

Then perfect, too quiet, silence.

 

“Either they’re onto us,” Leeron said quietly, drawing kunai out from the pouch at his belt and disposing of his cloak and boots, reverting back into a shinobi’s uniform, “Or they’re dumber than I could have possibly imagined.”

 

“What do you—”

 

The man didn’t explain, simply looked at Obito once and said darkly, “There are things, in these caverns, you do not wake.”

 

Then, distantly, battle drums started to pound. They grew louder and louder, echoing up from beneath Obito and the strange hybrid of his master. And Obito, once again, was reminded of how very much he hated caves.

 

“Shishou, where the hell are you going?!” Obito asked, sprinting after him, having to expel far too much chakra just to catch up. Evan as, he noted with some alarm, arrows were being shot at them and the sound of battle cries began to accompany the drums.

 

“Where am I going?! I am going to kill those motherfucking _hobbits_ , that’s where I’m going!”


	16. Chapter 16

_Part 16: Obito and the ring discuss the Leeron problem, Leeron takes up Lee’s terrifying mantle and thoughtlessly strikes fear into the hearts of goblins, and our heroes still don’t manage to find those pesky hobbits._

* * *

 

 

It was probably for the best that Lee, or Leeron rather, was pissed out of his goddamn mind. For one, they were moving fairly quickly considering that the cavern had been flooded in armed demons, which meant that they shouldn’t be too far off of Baggins’ trail and thus on their way out of this goddamn cave. The other was that it meant that his masculine quasi-shishou was incinerating everything in their path so that Obito didn’t have to.

 

And Obito meant that quite literally, waves of fire and heat rolled off Leeron, burning the gnarled, screaming, demon soldiers and their weapons to ashes within seconds. At first, the goblins had attempted to annihilate them, but at this point they had realized it was best to run away in abject terror, it wasn’t helping much.

 

As Obito noted, it was probably for the best, Obito and caves did not mix well after the Kannabi bridge. Obito really didn’t know how he’d handle fighting inside of a cave, given the mild panic and dread that always filled him just by sitting in one too long.

 

Still it would be less… alarming, if Leeron was showing a little more focus about where they were going and what they were doing. As it was, he kept muttering to himself as he stalked forward, burning everything that even flinched in their direction.

 

“Goddamn _hobbits_ and their bloody endless clever stupidity,” Leeron muttered even while flicking out a hand to send ropes of fire up towards the ceiling where demon archers had attempted to remove the threat from a distance, “They can’t sit still for even five minutes, can they? No, it’s always riddle games, stuffing your dwarf friends in barrels to send down river and seeing which of them manages not to drown, or setting an army of starving _goblins_ and _trolls_ on your enemies while you giggle at your own cleverness and sneak out the back door!”

 

“Shishou—” Obito tried to start, but Leeron wasn’t having it, chakra visibly rising off him in a blinding golden white color.

 

Lee, for all her eccentricities, for all her expressiveness, was surprisinglye even keeled. She tended to take things as they came, for better or worse, and often took the worst news better than most. In fact, Obito didn’t know if he’d ever seen her truly angry before. Wary, certainly, upset and disappointed, sure. Maybe he’d seen her harboring a low-grade, simmering, fury that she kept mostly to herself, when faced with Sauron but he hadn’t seen this thoughtless and explosive rage from her.

 

Leeron just kept muttering, slightly louder this time, sending out the fire further and faster to clear a path for the pair of them, “And then, like always, you’re stuck cleaning up everyone’s mess when if they’d just bloody well sit still, they’d have the ring already! Is that too much to ask?!”

 

“Shishou—” Obito tried again, slowing his pace so that he was safely behind her… him.

 

Leeron stopped and pivoted in one graceful moment, leaning over towards Obito with turquoise eyes glowing with both chakra and rage, and smoke poured out of his mouth like a dragon as he asked, “What?!”

 

“I think they get the idea,” Obito said, motioning to the charred corpses around them as well as the goblins fleeing in terror, scuttling up the walls like spiders from whence they came.

 

Leeron blinked once, twice, then shifted, “Oh… right, I’m not a _hobbit_.”

 

It was now Obito’s turn to wordlessly blink at her in confusion.

 

Leeron, slowly, as if caught in a dream, resumed walking, “When an army of goblins or a dragon comes for you, and you’re a hobbit or… possessing a hobbit, even with invsibility on your side, it’s almost certain death.”

 

Leeron grinned, rubbed the back of his head with an expression that Lee herself had given far too often to Minato-sensei, “I guess I forgot I wasn’t Baggins Bilbo for a moment there, rather than Eru Lee, red death of the third shinobi war.”

 

Obito kept staring, even as he forced his feet to move along with hers, and asked dully, “Does that… happen often?”  


“Well, I wouldn’t know, nothing like this has ever happened before after all,” Leeron noted with a far too cheerful smile, “You wore the ring, you know what it’s like. It’s usually… the ring’s chakra tends to dominate, an overpowering presence that corrupts the mind of its bearer. Besides, the ring strategizes I suppose, it reacts and counteracts, but ascribing it thought is a rather thoughtless thing to do. It’s clever, in its own right, but it’s still just an enchanted piece of jewelery. No, this, whatever this even is, is very new.”

 

This last was said as Leeron looked down at himself warily, as if still not quite sure what he thought of the idea of mixing Eru Lee and Sauron together until some cohesive sludge came out. Obito found that he was just as, if not incredibly more, dubious than Leeron.

 

“This is nice though,” Leeron said, now grinning from pointed ear to pointed ear, “I don’t have to worry about anything.”

 

“I wouldn’t say—” Obito started, but Leeron was lost in his own pretty little head again.

 

“No _nazgûl_ to drag me back to _Mordor_ , hardly any chance of losing a battle and having the ring unwillingly cut from my finger, no death, no resting at the bottom of rivers or mountains for thousands of years, good companionship… I could get used to this.”

 

“No, you can’t!” Obito spat back, hackles rising, only for Leeron to sigh even as he continued to anticlimactically butcher the fleeing goblins as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

 

Now, Obito had seen some impressive displays of power, he’d seen impressive displays of power from Lee, but whatever Lee had been holding back in order to not completely display her hand to Sauron or anyone else seemed to be gone and Leeron had no issues burning hundreds of sentient beings alive with nothing more than a thought.

 

“Yes, yes, we’re giving the ring back to Baggins Frodo and company,” Leeron said dismissively, ignoring Obito’s silent protests at how casually he said it, “You don’t have to remind me. Though, god knows what they’re going to do with it.”

 

“What do you mean?” Obito asked, frowning down at the demons littering the way even as he tried and failed to step around them.

 

Leeron gave a painful sort of shrug as he did his best to avoid stepping on the charred demon remains that hadn’t simply crumbled into ashes, “Well, the world is not as it once was. The age of the _elves_ is very nearly over, their kingdoms have faded in strength and grandeur as their people are drawn west across the sea. _Rivendell_ , _Lothlorien_ , _Greenwood_ , the great elven kingdoms that remain in this third age can’t survive a siege by Sauron’s forces, they can’t hold the ring.”

 

Leeron looked ahead, into the dark, following whatever slim trail of chakra Baggins Frodo had left behind with more determination than ever, “The _dwarves_ have retreated into the mountains, have all but disappeared into them with a number of their kingdoms falling to wreck and ruin as a price of their hubris and greed. Hope, then, appears to lie with men, but men are easily corrupted. More, the _elves_ remember all too well that Isildur son of Elendil, the one man who had had a chance to save _Middle Earth_ from all of this, chose the path of damnation.”

 

“Then… what will they do?” Obito asked, jogging to keep up as Leeron, slowly, began to run across the flat, carved, corridors of what must have been the heart of the dwarf kingdom.

 

That must be the Sauron in her, Obito thought grimly, as he doubted Lee would be so eager to sprint ahead of him inside of a cavern like this.

 

“There are only two reasonable and permanent solutions to the question of what to do about the one ring. First, Sauron collects the ring and the free people of _Middle Earth_ are once again doomed. Second, the ring is destroyed,” Leeron said, now moving faster with Obito having to push himself to catch back up to her.

 

Leeron hardly noticed as he continued speaking, his voice cool and easy as if he wasn’t running at all, “However, the ring can only be destroyed in the heart of _Mordor_ , and they would have to manage this without it somehow falling into Sauron’s grasp. So, do they push for the final solution the free peoples of Middle Earth would accept or do they choose temporary safety?”

 

Obito huffed, biting out the words even as his lungs began to burn, “Don’t you know what they want?”

 

“Hm?” Leeron asked, glancing back down at him.

 

Obito breathlessly motioned to the ring, the gold glinting in the bursts of fire, “The ring, it knows, right?”

 

Leeron opened his mouth, then closed it, and his expressive features became oddly unreadable for a moment, “He doesn’t know either.”

Oh, oh Obito thought he did. However, whatever he knew either he thought Obito wouldn’t like it or that it was in his best interest that Obito not know. Regardless, the man was lying to him, convincing at least a part of shishou that lying was in their best interest.

 

Obito had to get that ring off her finger.

 

He eyed her hand warily, the glinting and inviting gold, and felt cold sweat break out against his skin just from staring at it. They were already finding Baggins, but were they truly? How compromised was Lee, exactly? Perhaps Lee, perhaps even this merged thing they’d made, believed Baggins was down here but how unlikely was it that this Leeron would lead Obito straight into the depths of these caverns and then abandon him and take the ring for itself.

 

Except that Lee, Leeron, had spared Obito’s life before at Isengard. He’d even seen to it that Obito was somewhat rested and recovered before setting out again into the mountains. He’d offered to leave Obito behind that entrance, and had meant it. If it, the ring, was going to get rid of Obito through them then it would have done it already. Even with the sharingan, the mangekyo sharingan, Lee was more powerful than Obito and with him hemmoraging chakra and already injured he didn’t stand a chance.

 

There wasn’t any need to bring Obito into the depths of this demon infested hell of a cave if any of them just wished to dispose of him.

 

More, if Obito had learned anything about the ring, it was that it wanted to return to Mordor. True, it wanted to feel clever and manipulative about doing it, it also wanted revenge against Lee for chaining him up in Obito’s head, but more than anything else it wanted back on Sauron’s finger. While disposing of Obito would upset Lee greatly, it would all but ensure that the ring never returned to Mordor. If something happened to him, Obito knew, that Lee would never let the ring get what it wanted.

 

Lee wanted the ring to go to Baggins, the ring wanted to go to anyone else in the world, and for that Obito was willing to believe that they were, in fact, looking for the hobbit.

 

But how long would that take?

 

They’d already spent days in these mines with no hint of reaching either hobbits and company or the other side. Did Lee really have days to spare with that thing on her finger? Each day that passed Leeron seemed to… solidify just a little bit more.

 

He was becoming his own damn person, wasn’t he?

 

Suddenly, Obito felt something restless and uncomfortable moving inside his head. It felt like something from the academy, like there was some kid from the back of the class who’d been watching the lecture, had an answer to the question, but wasn’t sure he wanted to draw attention to himself and say it.

 

Oh hell.

 

 _“You’re still in here, aren’t you?”_ Obito asked, not out loud, but instead echoing the thought loudly in his own head and seeing what would bite.

 

 _“Lee did warn you that I would never truly leave,”_ the ring, his voice a shade or two lower than Leeron’s, said with the kind of smarmy amusement that had Obito wanting to punch him in the teeth, _“You and I are bound together for eternity. Such is the price of bearing any ring of power.”_

 

Oh, and wasn’t that unbearably smug? He said ring of power the way some of his cousins said Uchiha, like it was this grand, incomprehensible, thing that made them oh so superior to everyone else. When really, all the Uchiha blood had gotten them was good looks, barrels full of mental health issues, incest beyond incest, and the alien eyes that weren’t worth the price they’d paid for them.

 

Obito felt his eyes sliding to Leeron again, then back to the ring, wondering how it was managing this much divided attention between Leeron and Obito, _“Are you really in two places at once right now or are—”_

_“I have as little control over that thing as she does,”_ the ring bit out, surprisingly bitterly, and Obito could just imagine the look on his face as the maia paced about Obito’s mindscape, _“It has more than a mind of its own.”_

 

Obito moved forward, hand on the hilt of a kunai, leaning into the attack when the voice shouted inside his head, _“Don’t be a fool!”_

 

Obito stumbled, grinned sheepishly as Leeron glanced back to look at him with those eyes that were at once both Lee’s and anything but, and then fell back into a sprint.

 

 _“In this, boy, we are not enemies,_ ” the ring explained, _“Even that thing is not our enemy, not truly, for now I do believe he is inclined to hand the ring off to Baggins. Stab a blade through his back, though, and I am certain that will change. Leave him alone, and we’ll all get what we want.”_

Undoubtedly, something about that wasn’t true. Or, rather, the ring was hiding something in there for his own benefit, as he always did. However, Obito felt him relax all the same, if only because it confirmed at least something he’d thought himself. Comprimised or not, the pair of them would at least try to hand the ring back to Baggins.

 

The rest, Lee and Obito would figure out for themselves.

_“You’re that ready to see the back of us?”_ Obito couldn’t help but think, and he almost caught himself, at the idea that he was thinking at this thing that had taken residence in his head like it was an old friend.

 

No, more than that, like it was a closer and more understandable friend than goddamn Bakashi. Obito was talking to it… well, like it was just a step and a half down from being Lee-shishou.

 

Either the ring didn’t notice, or it behooved him not to comment, instead, he waspishly noted, _“Somehow, you two vex me more than hobbits.”_

This was left unexplained, and the presence faded into the back of his mind, as if the ring had retreated further into Obito’s mindscape where he wasn’t so easily accessed. Had he been in Obito’s memory of Konoha, standing near Rin, Kakashi, and Minato-sensei? Or was Madara’s cave truly that close to the surface of Obito’s thoughts.

 

Obito abruptly ran into Leeron. The man didn’t buckle, had come to a full and complete stop, and looked ahead with horrified eyes, “What did those fools wake? How deep did they dig?”

 

“Shishou?” Obito asked, but the man didn’t even seem to see him, instead his pale hand moved to the blade, gripping it but not drawing it from the sheath.

 

The goblins around them, the archers that had remained to try and remove them from a distance, stopped as well, and after a heartbeat with cries of animalistic terror even greater than when facing Leeron clambered over one another as they fled up the walls and into shadows. Suddenly, Leeron and Obito weren’t even a concern worth noting, in the face of whatever was coming.

 

A pulse of chakra, then another, almost like a heartbeat, and Obito felt his head turn to where a dull, red glow began to pour throught he hall. As if some dying sun had been lit beneath the earth.

 

“Shishou?” Obito asked again.

 

“There were relics,” Leeron whispered, “Of the first age that were left forgotten, buried, and sleeping beneath the earth. Servants and soldiers of Morgoth left behind after the wars had ended. Why is it, _dwarves_ always dig deep enough to call or else find them?”

 

Leeron’s legs shifted, from a stance to sprint into a stance to fight, for a momen he faced the orange glow, drawing his katana just an inch out of its sheath. Sweat glittered on his forehead and trickled down his throat, the orange glow spread across his pale skin and caught in his eyes.

 

Then, just like that, he cried out, “Nope!”

 

He turned on his heel, sheathed the sword, grabbed Obito by the hand and hauled him over his thin shoulders, and started sprinting away from the orange light as fast as he could go.

 

Obito stared for a moment back where they’d come, having been thrown over Lee’s shoulder like a bag of rice, and then asked the only question hat deserved asking, “Where the hell are we going?!”

 

Leeron laughed, but at this pace it came out as more of a delicate wheeze, and then answered, “We are not fighting a _balrog_ , that’s where we’re going!”

 

Leeron then, abruptly, sprinted forward and lunged up the wall, scampering up and incinerating any goblins in his path. With a great cry, he lept upwards, disappearing over the ceiling and rolling Obito in himself in a cramped and barely visible cranny that offered them both a place to hide and watch whatever happened below.

 

The goblins scuttled past them as Lee cast a genjutsu, using just enough power to hide them from sight and notice without flaring too much chakra, and with that he rolled onto his back and breathed a sigh of relief.

 

“Have I mentioned, any time today, how much I hate _hobbits_?” he groaned, hand falling to his ribs, as his chest heaved in an attempt to make up air from running, “ _Eru Illùvatar_ , I hate _hobbits_ so damn much.”

 

There was barely enough room to move, he was practically on top of the man as it was and shifting around would only end up bringing Obito closer. Still, all the same, he slowly rolled himself over so that he could look down at where they’d come from.

 

He immediately sucked in a breath, “What is that thing?”

 

He could barely see it, it was, at this point, an amorphous shape wreathed in both shadow and fire, something barely visible through the smoke, but with eyes that glowed and chakra as potent as a bijuu’s. For a moment, Obito wondered if it wasn’t truly a bijuu, this world’s version of a tailed beast.

 

“That, my friend, is a _balrog_ ,” Leeron said with an amused, if exhausted and bitter, smile as he himself rolled over to watch with Obito, “A fallen _maia_ from the first age, when Morgoth still plagued _Middle Earth_ and all the unfortunates that resided within it. Nothing that I’d want to tangle with if I had any other choice. Fortunately, you and I have another choice.”

 

“Hide?” Obito asked dully.

 

“There’s nothing wrong with running away from things that aren’t your problem,” Leeron said with a wisdom he certainly didn’t deserve. He then pointed down at the beast, at the killing intent rising off it, enough to choke a man as the unrestrained Kyubey’s was enough to smother children, “And that, is most certainly not our problem.”

 

Obito wanted to disagree, but something in the very nature of that thing prevented him. Lee, Leeron, whoever he was was right, if that thing wasn’t their problem then Obito didn’t want to touch it. Instead, as it passed beneath them and stalked forward, moving out of sight, he breathed a sigh of relief.

 

Then a horrible thought dawned on him.

 

“Shishou.”

 

“Hm?”

 

“If Baggins and company are still in this cave—”

 

“Oh, believe me, they are. Even if they did set _goblins_ and a _balrog_ on us, they’re still stuck here too—”

 

“Then don’t they have a very good chance of running into the _balrog_?”

 

Leeron said nothing for a moment, then another moment, simply stared wide-eyed down at the hulking beast wreathed in shadow and flame. Then, quietly, he whined out a single word that sounded as if it should be the vilest of curses, “ _Hobbits_!”

 

His face contorted, as if he was about to sob with exhaustion, and then he whined out the words that were probably meant to be said with far more conviction and confidence, “Obito, hold my beer.”

 

Which, in this case, meant sit there, look pretty, and don’t intervene unless it started looking very desperate. Obito was more than willing to comply with that.

 

The man rolled out from the shelf, falling back down to the ground, and as he did so he started to glow a bright, brilliant, and absolutely blinding white. Obito shielded his eyes, flinching away, but he didn’t dim even as the light approached the dull orange glow at the other end of the hall. So, Obito couldn’t watch, instead could only stain his ears as what sounded like… something like music rang out throught the carved halls.

 

Obito closed his eyes, sank into himself, and found himself face to face with the ring once again. As always, he was Annatar, the fairest and most elven of his guises, but this time it didn’t bother Obito as he sat across from the man.

 

There was nothing between them, no tea, no shogi set, no pretense at distraction but all the same Obito felt it was unnecessary. His mindscape was stripped bare for the occasion, as it deserved to be.

 

“There’s no need for such concern,” the man scoffed at Obito’s expression, “The truly great powers of the first age have long since departed this world in one form or another. Whoever this was, your master will handle him with ease and grace, especially with the power of the one.”

 

“Am I not allowed to be concerned?” Obito asked, and at this, the man smiled.

 

“I would think that you would have learned by now that it’s a rather pointless endeavor,” he said, and then his smile did something odd, it turned almost fond, “She is… truly remarkable.”

 

Obito knew that, he was very aware of that, but that wasn’t something he expected to hear from this man of all people. “Oh, what changed your mind?”

 

“Do you know that she still hasn’t given into the power of the ring?” the man asked, as if he wasn’t talking about himself specifically, “Anyone else, small or great, would have granted at least a foothold into their mind by this point. Her though, that bastard hybrid is the best I can manage, and even then, she still won’t give up. I am starting to believe she will never give up.”

 

No, Obito hadn’t thought it himself, not in those words, but it was true. Eru Lee would never give up, not in any way that truly mattered.

 

“You sound like you almost admire her,” Obito noted, unease growing through his stomach.

 

“I admire and covet powerful things,” the man said, his smile never dropping or dimming, “It is my one, true, weakness.”

 

“It’s not just that,” Obito said.

 

“You’re cleverer than you look,” the man said after a significant pause, eyes moving over Obito as if he suddenly warranted a second look, “You’re right, it’s not just the raw power, but also that unwavering loyalty and determination. She would move the heavens and earth for you and more, she has the power to do it that you lack. It’s a truly remarkable thing. Even something such as I, can admire that much.”

 

“Obito!”

 

Obito’s eyes flew open. There, above him, was Leeron grinning down with Lee’s brightest of smile. His hair was in disarray, matted with sweat and curling with heat. His face smudged with soot and ash. His clothing frayed, singed, and burned. However, just the same, he glowed. Not the blinding, too bright glow, but something soft and singing.

 

At once, Obito thought, the man was entirely too close, pressed uncomfortably close by the sheer cramped nature of their hiding place, and he wasn’t close enough.

 

The man laughed, his smile grew impossibly wider, “I do believe, Obito, I may have just become the heavy weight champion of the world.”

 

He pulled Obito down with him, floating them down towards the cavern and the cooling, smoking, husk that had so recently been the balrog, “Now, let’s go find some _hobbits_.”

**Author's Note:**

> This one is pure indulgence spurred on by me and no one else. I take all the blame for this shameless thing. Also a note of another shameless variety, I am not an expert on The Lord of the Rings. I know enough to be... dangerous, i.e. the vague bits and pieces that I remember from the books/Silmarillion when I tried reading it ages ago but mostly rely upon the films. So, with that, expect me to know some things but if you're looking for perfect accuracy via the books I will disappoint you.
> 
> Thanks for reading, comments kudos, and bookmarks are greatly appreciated.


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